


(Life is) A Series of Risks

by SkipandDi (ladyflowdi)



Series: The Infiltrate Series [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe, Character Death, Established Relationship, Grief, Kid Fic, M/M, PTSD, Post Reichenbach, Psychological Trauma, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-25
Updated: 2011-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-24 01:08:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 36,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/257161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyflowdi/pseuds/SkipandDi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The work comes first.</p><p>Can be read as a stand alone. Cowritten with MirrorSkippy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Жизнь-это череда рисков](https://archiveofourown.org/works/910760) by [KatiSark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KatiSark/pseuds/KatiSark)



> The siren call of Reichenbach was entirely too much for us to resist. Set in the same universe as Infiltrate, two years post Love Song of Two Idiots (i.e. Sherlock and John have married and recently become the parents of a son), should be understandable on its own.
> 
> A huge thank you to Green_grrl for her fantastic beta, Torakowalski for her Brit-pic, and Gigantic for her suggestions and insights. Any remaining mistakes are our own.
> 
> Fantastic artwork by geekboylover [here](http://geekboylover.livejournal.com/13781.html), so worth a look!

John identifies Sherlock's body on a Thursday.

It’s a cold September morning, foggy and damp. The trees have begun to change color, and every street corner is a wash of red, yellow, and orange. It’s the last bit of color before the dreary gray of winter, and reminds John of his childhood, of his mother’s willow tree that would turn into a yellow as beautiful and golden as sunlight.

When he enters Scotland Yard Lestrade is waiting for him at the front desk. He is drawn, his lips bloodless. His hair is standing on end, and there is a dirty smudge along his jaw. It isn’t the DI standing before him -- it’s John’s friend, his eyes empty and exhausted.

The baby John gives to Dimmock, Andrew’s third favorite police detective in the world. He watches Dimmock cradle his son gently through the glass windows of Lestrade’s office.

He'd been the only one in the munitions lab at that hour of the morning, Lestrade says. No one could have predicted that the tear gas canister would go off like a bomb, setting off countless explosions around the lab. It would have taken down the entire wing of the building, had they not rebuilt with reinforced steel after Moriarty tried to blow the station up. No foul play at this time. The tech team was still analyzing the canister remains, but had already attributed the explosion to faulty manufacturing. Sherlock’s discovery had saved countless lives.

John accepts a police evidence bag from Lestrade, signs that he has taken it. In it are the melted remains of keys and a magnifying glass, both which he’d had on him at the time of the explosion and both of which cannot be salvaged.

And left to hang on a hook outside of the munitions lab, and now wrapped with infinite care, is his coat.

“I want to see him,” John says.

“I’m sorry,” Lestrade tells him. “There isn’t--” He looks down. His face is pinched tight. “John, there isn’t much left.”

“Dental records?”

“Come through already. But even if they hadn’t...” John watches his Adam’s apple bob. “Are you sure?”

He’s sure.

The body is completely destroyed. John isn’t startled by it -- hard to be, as an ex-soldier who’d spent the majority of his adult life in Afghanistan. He’s seen dozens of corpses pulled from the wreckage left by roadside bombs, from landmines. This one is just like the rest, little left but dried, withered bone; almost all the flesh and skin has been seared from the body, limbs drawn up tight from the heat of the explosion. The corpse is unrecognizable, save for the remnants of a single black curl behind the corpse’s ear. When John touches it, it crumbles into dust under his fingertip.

The funeral is beautiful, and attended by hundreds of people. John sits in the front row and holds Andrew, sleepy and still in his arms. Sherlock’s mother is on his left, Mycroft on his right. Neither of them cry, which, John thinks, is very British of them. Sherlock wouldn’t have liked a show of emotions -- they’d always made him so uncomfortable.

They bury Sherlock at the ancestral home, in a family plot where fifteen generations of the Holmes family are buried. Where his father is buried.

“Stay with me for a bit, John,” Adella asks of him that same afternoon. Her house is full of mourners, eating, walking about. Sometimes it’s hard to think that Sherlock was related to half of these people, that John was too, in a way. John has only met a few of them personally, at the party Adella had insisted on after John and Sherlock signed the papers for their civil union. John hadn’t actually remembered most of it, high on nerves and unrelenting joy and a parade of faces with that distinctive Holmesian brow and regal nose.

“Adella.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m not alone,” he replies. She’s been holding his hand for the past hour, curled in her lap. Her skin is paper-thin, soft.

“Harriet’s only just arrived in New York to support Clara’s endeavors,” Adella says, “and my son and his wife barely had time to spare _before_ Mycroft’s change in position—”

“I’m not alone, Adella,” John interrupts calmly. “London is home. Andrew has his nursery, his tumble classes and swimming.” His son is his first priority -- his only priority, now.

She looks as if she wants to argue, but doesn’t. Her eyes are shiny, filled with some emotion John can’t describe. She squeezes his hand tightly in hers, and John kisses her cheek. “Thank you.”

They go home. John cleans the flat, and feeds Andrew even when his little face twists at the taste of peas, and plays with him like he always does. Every night when the sun goes down he bathes Andrew in the kitchen sink, washes his blond curls, lets him play with the bubbles and rubber toys, and afterward gently rubs lotion into his small legs and arms and belly until he falls asleep.

It's a week before he realizes he's still wearing his suit from the funeral. There is baby food on the sleeve.

Mycroft comes by two and three times a week to see how they're doing, to bounce Andrew on his knee. John answers him without hearing the questions, and sometimes during those visits, when he's very tired, he lets Mycroft take over for a bit, to feed and bathe and play with Andrew, to bring them supper, to surreptitiously direct one of his minions to clean the parts of the flat that have got away from John. Every so often, when he's so tired he can't fathom moving ever again, John lets Mycroft help him crawl into bed.

Those times, Mycroft will sit at John's side and look very old, and tell him all about when Sherlock was little, running around their enormous grounds like a tiny wild creature, with his raucous curls and his smile as wide as the sun. It will be so vivid that John will fall to sleep smelling sunshine and soap, hearing children laughing and screaming and playing.

The nightmares, when they come, are as startling as they are terrifying in their intensity. It’s the same, every night -- he’s in the field hospital in Kandahar _dust bright death desert death_ and Sherlock is dying in front of him. Sometimes John’s in his belly like he was the night Moriarty tried to kill them both, the sense-memory of Sherlock’s blood and tissue and organs under his hands as fresh as if it were really happening, all over again. Sherlock is screaming and John can’t get the bomb out, slippery and hot, no matter how much he tries. Sometimes, Sherlock is trapped in a jeep that’s been caught in a roadside bomb and John is watching him burn to death, skin boiling, eyes liquefying, lips curling back from his skull until his voice is lost under the flames.

Life goes on. Meals still need to be cooked, clothing still needs to be washed, nappies need to be changed and floors need to be mopped. Andrew’s first birthday still needs to be celebrated; John bakes a cake for his son and helps him open his presents from Mycroft and his wife, and Mrs. Hudson, and Grandmummy, and a few little presents from the people John works with. The cake is a little dry but Andrew doesn't seem to mind, covered from head to toe in it. John tries to play the violin, badly, but Andrew is a sweet little soul and he laughs and claps anyway.

Slowly, inevitably, Sherlock disappears from the flat. Experiments left half-finished and incomplete thoughts left to waste are cleared to give Andrew space to play -- comb and aftershave and soap put away to make room for Andrew’s bubble bath and snugly towels. The bookcase is rearranged for parenting books and a place for Andrew’s music and DVDs.

John had thought, foolishly, that there was only Before Afghanistan and After Afghanistan, that the dichotomy of his life was severed along that fragile line between civilian life and the horror of war. Instead he’s widowed at thirty seven, with a young son and bills to pay, and so angry at the world that there are days he can’t function in it, hiding away in Baker Street until he can breathe without his chest feeling like it’s about to cave in.

**

Andrew grows so fast. He goes from being a fat baby to a tubby toddler to a precocious two year old, beautiful and clumsy and loud, prone to getting the giggles, and the one bright spot in John’s life. It doesn’t matter that both Sherlock and Harry are his biological parents, or that both Sherlock and John are the ones listed as his parents on his birth certificate; Andrew is all Holmes, from his curls to his nose to a set of brains anyone would be proud of. John’s child is not just clever -- he’s _brilliant, literally_. His nursery school teacher talks to John about it, and it isn’t as if John has been blind to how smart his child is, it’s just that it takes someone _else_ noticing for him to take Andrew to the doctor and have him tested.

They check him for all manners of physical and psychological ailments, take MRIs of his brain, and do a whole month’s worth of tests before declaring that, vision problems aside, Andrew is perfectly healthy. “He isn’t a prodigy, John -- prodigies are usually only gifted in one or two areas like music, or art,” their GP, Doctor Smith, says with his distinctive American accent. “Andrew’s got the whole deal. Blew our psychologist away, we had to call a specialist from Oxford. He’s twenty-two months old, and your son reads at a second grade level. Not only reads, but _understands what he’s reading._ He’s starting to conceptualize abstract ideas and argue logically about perceived injustices, even if said injustices include his nursery classroom only serving chocolate milk on Fridays.”

John considers this for a moment. “You’re saying he shouldn’t be able to do all of that.”

David snorts, rubs a hand over his face. “John, you came asking for my medical opinion, so here it is. I’ve never seen a kid like Andrew. He’s almost two -- he should be picking his nose and eating crayons, not doing math in his head. Andrew is smart, a whole helluva lot smarter than we can measure right now, at this stage in his development. I can tell you this: your son is gifted, John. Profoundly so.”

David gives him pamphlets and books on the subject, and contact numbers for support classes for parents with gifted children.

On the way home, they stop at the Tesco and John buys Andrew a chocolate milk and a copy of _Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs._

**

John makes the decision soon after that he isn’t going to treat Andrew any differently than he always has. The truth is he has no idea what he’s doing, lives his life utterly on the edge hoping he isn’t going to screw his son up too badly, but in this he thinks he’s made the right choice. He still makes Andrew help clean up his room, put away his toys, set the table -- he’d broken four plates before John finally realized they should switch to molded plastic. He still expects his son to have his schoolwork done, not looking too closely at the worksheets his nursery had provided or thinking too much on the fact that he’s the only student at Le Jardin à l'Ouest with homework. Andrew is so smart, and so young, and doesn’t have the fine motor skills to keep up with his mind, so John helps him fill them out as Andrew gives him the answers. This week they’re working on subtraction.

His son, John comes to realize, is a creature of the most unrelenting, unshakable habit, and it reminds John of Mycroft so much it’s frightening. As Andrew gets older his mind begins to work faster, like a car warming up. Sherlock had always let that wild intellect fly, but like his uncle, Andrew uses his schedule as a rudimentary control on his mind. Everything is alright so long as breakfast is promptly at a quarter to eight, and school begins at nine, and Daddy is there to pick him up, rain or shine or sleet or snow, exactly at four. Tea by five, bath by six, and then a bit of TV and reading time before bed, exactly at eight. There are no surprises with Andrew; any deviation to his routine sends him into hysteria.

Which is why the very last place John wants to be in the entire universe, at five in the evening on a Monday, is the bloody Tesco.

Sundays were his shopping days, early in the morning before the worst of humanity rolled out of bed. The Express right by the flat was all well and good, but most weeks they’d run out of everything by Sunday, so John would bundle Andrew up and they’d get the Tube to the Edgware Road Metro. Sunday mornings are always quietest at that hour, just him and a few old ladies, and so he’d get a coffee, and settle Andrew into the shopping trolley with a box of cheerios to keep him occupied, and armed with infinite amounts of patience, he would get the shopping done.

This week, however, the surgery had been open for emergency hours Sunday morning, to patch up those sterling examples of humanity who’d been a bit overzealous in their World Cup celebrations. Broken bones, lacerations, even a case of internal hemorrhaging. It’d been like Afghanistan all over again, only instead of putting soldiers back together he’d been doctoring drunken idiots, two of whom had grabbed his bloody arse and one he’d had to put in a headlock.

Andrew is a sweet child, a wonderful child, but this deviation from their routine -- and he knows his routine, keeps moaning about what he should be doing in that exact moment -- is sending him round the twist, and from the moment they get off the Tube and into the overcrowded Tesco his child, the love of his heart, is driving him _insane._ He’s uncomfortable, he’s sleepy, he doesn’t like the noise – I don’t want _those_ crackers Daddy even though they’re on sale this week, and pease no cheese _I don’t like cheese it is horrible please forget that I eat it every day_ , and no, no, no pasghettis and no chickens and no food, _I will not be eating this week Daddy._

Add to that John’s forgotten his vouchers on his desk at home, meaning they’ll be paying full price for everything, something he hasn’t done since the first week he moved in with Sherlock. What’s worse, the shop hasn’t restocked the shelves since the weekend so there aren’t nappies, or the wipes John, and Andrew’s backside, like. The price of coffee has gone up, the price of sausages, John’s least favorite meal, has gone down, and there is a truly, _unholy_ number of people packed into the store.

John doesn’t do well with crowds on a good day, and this is absolutely unspeakable. Mums with children and men in business clothes and loud teenagers and even louder twenty-somethings from the closest uni and _Andrew_ , a furious, squirming mess. “No, Daddy,” his son sobs. “No, no, _no_.”

“Andrew,” John says calmly, clutching the shopping trolley tightly and staring down at his child, who is looking back up at him, red-faced with angry tears. “You have to eat.”

“I don’t _like_ these foods,” Andrew bawls, twisting in his seat to get to their shopping. He throws a tin of beans out of their trolley, a bag of pasta following it. “I don’t wanna eat these foods!”

“They’re healthy for you, you’re going to eat them and _like_ them,” John replies, picking up the beans and pasta, which thankfully survived their unexpected trip intact.

When he straightens Andrew is holding their milk, looking furious and worse, _mutinous_ , and so exactly like Sherlock that it takes his breath away. Sometimes, sometimes John forgets that Andrew inherited more than his curls and his brains from his papa. He grabs the trolley tightly with one hand, the milk with the other, and leans in very close. “If you throw this milk, Andrew Holmes, I’ll be very, very upset.”

The look that crosses Andrew’s face very clearly says _Good_ , so John goes for the jugular. “Not only will I be upset, and I will be no mistake, but I will be _disappointed_.”

That stops his son up short. John had learned long ago just how much his good opinion meant to Andrew, and he gave it often and freely, but lord above in these moments he wasn’t above using it. “I’ll be disappointed that my big boy not only caused such a scene in the middle of his favorite shop, but that he destroyed something that took many, many people to create.”

Andrew’s face screws up again with fresh tears, but John cuts them off at the pass. “Where does milk come from?”

His baby snuffles horribly, chin wobbling, and John’s heart feels like it’s breaking. Andrew goes from looking like he’s going to fling it to hugging the milk to him, and John, after a moment to see which way it’s going to go, continues on to the next aisle. “M-milk come from cows. Moo.”

“That’s right. How do we get the milk?”

That past spring Andrew’s nursery had gone on a field trip to a dairy farm in Kent. Andrew had been fascinated ever since, and every toy he’d got for his birthday had been somehow farm related. They even had a bedtime storybook about farming John had read ragged, the page corners soft with use. “The cow’s mudders.”

John bites his lip, picks up a tin of tomato paste. “That’s right. And once it comes out of the cow, what then?”

Andrew presses his cheek against the top of the milk bottle, woeful. “Then the farmers they clean it.”

A woman knocks into him at a bad angle and John grabs the trolley, waiting for his foot to stop throbbing. “Pasteurization,” John reminds him, flexing his toes carefully until they stop screaming at him. Farmer Bob certainly fucking talked about it enough in his book. “And then?”

“And then they make it in a carbon and put it out for kids.”

“Yes, they put milk in cartons, and jugs, and jars, for the children to drink. So after all that hard work, both for the cow and the farmer, would it be nice of us to throw it on the ground?”

“No,” Andrew says, voice pitching up in an aborted wail. His eyes are filled with tears again. “I don’t want those cereals,” he adds.

John exhales slowly through his nose. “You love this cereal. I think you’re upset that we have to be here at this hour buying it.”

“No I don’t like it,” Andrew bawls, and they’re at it again.

He cries throughout the rest of their shopping. He sobs as John picks out meats, and wails when John gets orange juice, and positively howls as John gets their yogurt.

By the time he’s ready to pay Andrew has literally cried himself to sleep, clutching the milk to him fiercely as it shoves his glasses up on one side and into his hair, and John’s hands are shaking so badly he drops his bank card as he hands it to the woman at the till. She smiles at him, sympathetic, and doesn’t make him have Andrew let go of the milk, giving it to him, with a wink, for free.

Getting home is another adventure entirely. John’s got six shopping bags and as they leave the shop one newly hysterical toddler, who cries brokenly into John’s bad shoulder where he’s sprawled, half asleep and miserable. Hailing a cab in this traffic at this hour is a near impossibility and the Tube is an idea so bad it’s not worth thinking about, so John walks the mile home, Andrew a dead weight in his arms and the shopping cutting off circulation to everything else.

Later, after the shopping is put away, and Andrew has been bathed and fed and finally put to bed, John sits at the kitchen table and puts his head in his hands and cries until his face feels swollen and his joints tremble. He only allows himself ten minutes of that nonsense before he picks up and carries on. There’s no other choice, really.

That night Andrew crawls into bed with him, squishing himself up against John’s chest, and, voice wobbling, whispers, “I’m sorry for being a bad boy and almost throwing milk in the shop.”

“It’s alright,” John mumbles back, arranging them both comfortably so Andrew can snuggle into the warm spot he’d created. “You’re a good boy because you didn’t throw it after all.”

“A really good boy?”

“A super good boy,” John replies. “Go to sleep now.”

Andrew snuffles, and wriggles, and finally, finally settles. John is on the cusp of falling back to sleep when Andrew whispers, “I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you, Andrew,” John whispers back, and kisses his soft baby hair and tugs the blankets up cozily over them both.

**

The nightmares never really stop.

John doesn’t have time for a therapist anymore, but he uses the coping mechanisms she taught him to try and get control of himself. There are good days, spent laughing with Andrew, taking him to the park, or just staying at home baking, one of his son’s favorite things to do. Those days aren’t as often as John would like. Most of the time it’s the daily grind of get-up-go-to-work, Andrew whining for most of the hours he’s awake, something in the flat breaking, or enduring Mycroft’s visits, which are surprisingly often given the man's decision to move from a 'minor' position in the government to one of its official leaders -- deputy prime minister is a decidedly _major_ position. John would have been shocked by the move if he'd had any energy at the time, and now it just doesn't seem worth it. Nothing has really changed, after all.

And it isn’t that John doesn’t want Mycroft to see his nephew; nothing could be further from the truth. John cares for his brother-in-law, but the man is far too perceptive for his own good, and he’s a bit of a bad influence on Andrew, who has become obsessed with his uncle’s pocket watch and now has their routine down to the _minute_.

He spends all of his non-working time with his son, and learns to cope with a child who, while unbelievably intelligent, is still a child. All of his conversations begin to revolve around Andrew, and with Andrew, and about Andrew -- his son is already the center of his universe, but his world narrows down until it’s _only_ Andrew. They go to the park, and to museums, and for long walks; they spend hours every Saturday at the library, until Andrew has a mountain of books, picture books and First Reader books and as they edge past his second birthday, chapter books. They’re reading Harry Potter every night, and John wonders how long it will be before Andrew catches his dad editing out the scary bits.

Things are so bloody difficult. He didn’t realize how difficult it would be, raising a child by himself, trying to afford a flat he never expected to be paying for on his own. Neither did he have any idea how much work went into making sure his boy was washed and fed and cared for to his standards; keeping up with the house, and working full-time, and making sure Andrew’s mind was stimulated in these most crucial years. It seems most days that no sooner does he fall into bed than it’s time to get back up again, and each time he’s just that fraction more exhausted.

The second winter after Sherlock’s death is one of the worst on record. It gets so cold in London that the city nearly shuts down, and the surgery is full to bursting with patients every day. Even though John gets his flu jab, and takes care to wash and scrub at every opportunity, he’s still run-down, still exhausted, and so it’s without any sort of surprise that he wakes up one morning and realizes he can’t get out of bed.

It’s terrifying, how ill he is. It seems to take a herculean effort to sit up, to push his legs out of bed, to stand, and when he does the world goes sideways and he finds himself on the floor, retching last night’s dinner.

He hears Andrew calling his name from the doorway, and the patter of small feet as they race up to him. “No, no,” he mumbles, pushing his son away. “No, love, you’ll get sick too. Get Daddy’s phone, please.”

God help him, he can’t get up. He tries once, twice, and then gives up the ghost, leaning back against the bed frame, exhausted and drenched in sweat. It seems to take forever for Andrew to come back, and John keeps hearing him, close and yet somehow far away. He needs to get up to find his son, but his legs won’t seem to work. “Andrew,” he croaks, terror clawing up his throat. “Andrew!”

“Daddy,” Andrew says, appearing in the doorway with John’s phone, the wall charger still attached. “I couldn’t take it off!”

“It’s alright.” His eyes are burning with double vision, and he can barely see the screen and the bloody fucking touch-buttons. He keeps misdialing, so he hands the phone back to his son. “Push and hold number five.”

It’s useless. Andrew doesn’t have the coordination, and his little fingers keep slipping off. John curses Apple to the furthest reaches of hell. “Daddy,” Andrew sobs, and John calms him gently. “Shh, shh, it’s alright, it’s okay. Try again, baby.”

He does, and this time he’s able to get the call to go through. John takes the phone from him, but after five rings the call goes to Mrs. Hudson’s voicemail, and he remembers abruptly that she‘d left for Cornwall yesterday, to visit her niece. “Damn,” he mumbles.

Andrew gasps, and John cracks one eye open to look at his boy, who’s staring at him with a hand over his mouth. “Daddy,” he says, hushed. “You said a bad word.”

“I did,” he answers, thoughtful, swiping a hand over his eyes to clear the sweat from them. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Andrew replies. “Daddy, are you very sick?”

“I think so,” John says, leaning his head back against the bed. “I’ll be able to get up in a moment. I was trying to call Mrs. Hudson.”

“Mrs. Hudson went to Corny’all,” Andrew tells him sensibly.

“I know, I just remembered,” John says. “And your uncle is in India, for Aunt Mahdavi’s sister’s wedding.”

Andrew’s eyes light up. “He said he would bring me something.”

“Yes, he did.” John thinks. “Well, nothing for it. Let’s call Uncle Geoff.”

This time he can see the screen enough to dial, even though it burns his eyes and makes them water. Andrew stares at him as if he’s never seen his father before, and John _hates_ that his boy is seeing him like this.

He hates it more when his call goes right to Geoff’s voicemail, and John’s world narrows down, once more, to himself and his son.

He wants to bury his face in his hands and cry, but Andrew is crouched next to him, Ribbit tucked under his arm and worry all over his face. John swallows until he can speak. “I guess we’re going to have a little holiday this week, love. No school today, and no work for me. What do you say?”

“I want to go to school, we leave for school at eight-oh-nine,” Andrew says. “I want to finish my project.”

“I’m too sick to leave the house, Andrew,” John tells him, keeping his voice as calm as possible. “And there’s no one here to help us. I’m sorry, love.”

Andrew chews on his lip in an effort not to cry -- seeing his dad like this isn’t helping, John knows. Why don’t you go and get into your play-clothes, love.

“Daddy?”

“Mind me, please.”

“You didn’t say nothing.”

He blinks his eyes open. “Go and get dressed. I’ll make you breakfast.”

He hears Andrew leave, socks padding on floor, and begins the long, messy process of getting to his feet. He can hear Andrew in his bedroom, and the safety alarm is still turned on at the front door, but he leaves the bathroom door open anyway and struggles to get himself out of his sopping-wet clothes. The world is swimming but he just needs a shower, a shower will help.

He wills Geoff to call back, because he has his pride -- he can’t call him twice in one morning. Asking Lestrade to leave the Met anyway is beyond selfish, and John wishes he hadn’t called him at all. What could the man do that John wasn’t doing already?

He hears the telly come on in the sitting room and stumbles into the shower, shaking with heat, and then when the water hits him, cold. He trembles and shudders and groans into his arm, leaning against the shower wall. After a moment he forces himself upright, scrubbing the sweat off of himself as fast as he can manage.

How he makes Andrew breakfast, he’ll never know, nor does he remember. When again he swims up to consciousness he finds himself stretched out on the sofa without a clue as to how he got there. He’s never been so sick in his entire life, and never been so scared of his body’s failure. Andrew fades in and out in front of his eyes, restless and agitated.

The world narrows to a gray, formless space, splashes of color swimming across his vision -- Andrew’s red shirt, Ribbit’s green fur -- and always, Andrew’s voice. He talks to his son, tries to keep him calm, and finally, after a long time, says, “Andrew? Get Daddy’s phone again.”

“Are you waked now?”

His son is crying, and John mumbles, “Shh, it’s alright. I’m just not going to be able to take care of you very well today. Let’s call your grandmummy.”

Andrew sniffles, and John opens his eyes and watches his son, superimposed three times on his vision, fumble with John’s mobile. As God as his witness, he’s throwing the blasted thing away as soon as he could make it out to buy a different one. “Grandmummy?”

“Yes, love.”

He takes the phone from Andrew, sitting up enough to focus his eyes on the screen. The light burns into his brain, and he squints, eyes watering, going through his contacts list until he reaches Adella.

She’s the last person he wants to call, the last person he wants to know what’s happening, the last person he wants to be weak in front of. But he calls her, because there isn’t a choice in the matter, not when John can’t bloody get up, let alone care for his son.

There’s an answer on the second ring. _“Mrs. Holmes’ office, Demetrius speaking, how can I help you?”_

“Adella.”

 _“John?”_ He hears a rustle, the mechanical noise of a phone switching out of speaker-phone. _“What an unexpected surprise. Is everything alright?”_

“I...”

 _“John?”_ Adella says again, and John’s head swims badly, darkness curling in around the corners of his eyes. He struggles against it, forcing himself back into focus, only to realize that he no longer has the phone.

“--es, Gra’mum,” Andrew is saying. The phone is as big as his head, smushing his glasses to one side. John takes a second to thank God his child is still wearing them at all, with how often he lost them. “He went _blaugh_ all over the floor, and his eyes are red and pink, and he’s sweaty too.” He looks up at John. “Yeah. White all over.” His chin wobbles, badly. “He was sleeping and wouldn’t wake up, and then he waked up and told me to get the phone. Is Daddy going to be okay?”

Whatever Adella tells him reassures him -- he scrapes a hand across his eyes. “Okay, I love you too.” He kisses the receiver and then hands the phone back over.

John is mortified, right to the heart, but before he can say a word Adella tells him, _“John, I’ll be there in less than an hour. I want you and Andrew to stay right where you are, am I understood?”_

“Adella--”

 _“Am I. Understood.”_

“Yes ma’am.”

 _“Good.”_

She hangs up in his ear, and John exhales slowly, full of shame. He looks at his son, whose chin is still wobbling, and reaches out to squeeze his hand. “You’ve been very good, helping your dad. I’m sorry I haven’t been able to take much care of you today.”

“It’s okay,” Andrew says, snuffling, and rubs his nose dry on Ribbit’s head.

John’s awareness on his surroundings fade, but he’s only dozing when the door opens downstairs. “John?” Adella calls, punching the alarm code in, though he can’t remember ever giving it to her, and making her way up the steps. Andrew starts to sob the moment she steps into the room.

“Andrew,” she murmurs, and his son throws himself into her arms. She lifts him as if he doesn’t weigh half her own body mass. She smells like home, and _Sherlock_ , and John swallows convulsively so he won’t vomit. “John,” she sighs, sitting on the sofa beside his hip.

“I didn’t want to call you.”

“That much is obvious,” she replies, running a hand over his forehead. “How long?”

“Less than twenty four hours,” he says, closing his eyes with relief -- her hand is so cool, and he’s so bloody _hot_. “Mycroft is in India.”

“I’m well aware of the fact.”

“I thought I could--”

“That is also obvious,” she answers, and after kissing Andrew on the forehead, sets him on the floor and stands to take her coat off. “Stupid, foolhardy, but obvious. I have the family doctor driving in, he should be here in less than ten minutes.” She takes a look around the flat, wrinkles her nose, and John wishes he could die, just curl up and _die._

She doesn’t leave for two weeks. John survives the flu and comes out on the other end shaken and weak but all in one piece, with another set of nightmares but thankfully none the worse for wear. He almost doesn’t survive her _visit_ , and by the time they wave her goodbye from the front stoop to Baker Street, even Andrew says, “I love gra’mum, but it’s better just you and me.”

He couldn’t agree more.

**

Andrew often says brilliant things, to the point that John stops being surprised by the words that come out of his son’s mouth. Less when, a month before the second anniversary of Sherlock’s death, Andrew asks about his papa for the first time.

The sun has started to go down and the news is on -- apparently David Beckham and his wife are having another child. He's got chicken frying, and noodles boiling, and a pot roast in the cooker for tomorrow because he's picking up an extra shift at the surgery while Andrew's at his uncle's house. Andrew's been quiet for days now, almost as if he's mulling something over, but John had promised himself long ago that if he were ever lucky enough to have children he wouldn't try to smother them, as his own mother had done. He knows Andrew will tell him in his own time, brilliant as his child is, and so it isn't but half a surprise when Andrew abandons his blocks and toddles into the kitchen. "Hello love," he says, and hands him a bit of tomato from where he's chopping them. "Having fun?"

"I’m building a rocket ship," Andrew says matter-of-factly, as if it were perfectly normal for two year olds to be building rocket ships to scale out of legos. "It's gonna go _vroooooom_ ," he thrusts a hand into the air, "up in the sky!"

"Brilliant," John says, smiling, and sweeps his thumb over a bit of tomato that has run down Andrew's chin. "What are the things you like?"

It's a game they've been playing since Andrew was old enough to respond. The little boy's face lights up like Christmas and he spends the next ten minutes dashing about the flat, pointing out each thing that he likes, and then each thing that his stuffed bears like, the ten of them that live on the sofa, and then each thing that the lego rocket ship likes. By the time he's finally winding down the chicken is done and the noodles are cooked, and John decides that, as a special treat, they'll eat cross-legged at the coffee table so that Andrew's battalion of fuzzy friends can partake in the rugby match about to start on the telly.

"Now you!" Andrew says, slurping a noodle up into his mouth, and when that doesn't quite work stuffing it in with his fingers.

"Me?" John asks, just like he always does. He pretends to be shocked. "Why, there are only three things that I like."

Andrew giggles, holds out his three fingers. "Me!"

"You," John agrees. "I like you more than anything else in the whole entire world."

“The football team.”

"Good lad, that's the national spirit."

That funny look crosses Andrew's face again. John watches the thoughts go through his little mind, filter over his face as he looks at the frames of Sherlock on the mantle, and the photo album they take down from time to time. He knows what Andrew is going to ask before he even says it. "What things do Papa like?"

“Lots of things,” John replies, gently feeding Andrew a spoonful of peas. “He liked you most of all.”

“And you!” Andrew says sensibly around his peas.

“And me,” John says, propping his chin up on his hand. “He also liked his violin, and the laboratory upstairs, and having grand adventures.”

Andrew hugs his Ribbit to his chest. “Will he be back soon?”

He isn’t expecting the hot flash of grief, or Andrew’s big eyes. Too smart; he’s simply too smart by half. “No, love. He isn’t going to come back.”

“Why?”

It’s a question John simply doesn’t have an answer to. He doesn’t want to lie to his son, but neither can he tell him the entire truth. “Well,” he says, setting his glass down. “It’s like Mr. Gold.”

Mr. Gold had been a kindly sort of goldfish, if goldfish could be kindly, gifted to Andrew by his uncle and aunt. Andrew had loved that fish as if it were his own child, feeding it, playing with it, and insisting it accompany them everywhere – John had quickly learned that London cabbies didn’t generally approve of sea creatures, let alone live ones. For a while he’d thought the Head at the nursery was going to have words with him about it, or that Tesco would throw him out for bringing beloved family pets into their supermarket.

Mr. Gold had inevitably met his end through peaceful and natural circumstances, as goldfish were wont to do, but Andrew had been so utterly devastated that it had become their first discussion on death. They’d had a little ceremony in the garden and buried Mr. Gold under the azalea bush that Andrew had insisted had been his favorite, and then John had sat his son down and explained to him that though they couldn’t see Mr. Gold anymore they would always love and remember him.

Mr. Gold’s passing is too fresh, and Andrew’s eyes film with tears. “Mr. Gold is in heaven.”

“That’s right love,” John says, gently brushing his curls back. “Mr. Gold is in heaven, with your papa. He’s taking care of Mr. Gold now until we can go and see him.”

Andrew’s lower lip quivers. “Will we see Papa soon?”

It hurts, like a knife to the heart. “Not yet,” he says, kissing his forehead. “You have so much to do still. But one day, a long long long _long_ time from now, you’ll go to heaven, and I’ll go to heaven too, and we’ll be together, the three of us.”

His son thinks about this, mulls it over – he is so beautiful, and so intelligent, and so perfect. John sweeps him up into his arms, gives him a tight, fierce hug. “I love you so much, Andrew.”

Andrew’s arms link around his neck and squeeze, and then just like that he’s running off to play and John is left there at the coffee table, unsure if his knees can hold him.

**

Time keeps dragging forward, one day melting into the next and the one after, a relentless progression, until they’re more than halfway to Andrew’s third birthday. A lot has happened in the intervening time, and yet it seems like nothing has changed except Andrew himself, who is bigger and smarter and more in need of things John’s not sure how to give him. Andrew’s fine motor skills are still lagging behind his peers, and his vision issues are a nightmare for both of them. It’s a battle every day to get him to keep his glasses on, despite the clear band that is supposed to wrap around his head and keep him from pulling them off. He hates wearing them but hates it more when he can’t see things properly, and doesn’t always seem to accept that there’s a relationship between the two. John is sick to death of worrying about what Andrew’s going to walk into next -- he’s had bumps and bruises and one time a black eye, which made John feel like the worst parent in all of creation. The months he had to wear eye-patches it was outright war.

And despite Andrew’s insatiable curiosity about almost everything else he’s overly-wary of strangers, of anyone who might interrupt his routine. It makes it hard to get Andrew to socialize, for _John_ to socialize.

John had tried to introduce someone new, and it hadn’t gone well.

So, as usual, it’s just the two of them heading towards the park. It’s Andrew’s favorite because it has lots of climbing ladders, and a big boy slide, and brand new teeter-totters of Elmo and Cookie Monster, both of whom Andrew admires greatly for their ability to count to a hundred. John likes it for the benches and the thick playground rubber underfoot, rather than the pebbles Andrew thinks should go into his various orifices.

Really though, John should be less surprised to see Mycroft sitting on their favorite bench, completely unbothered by anyone who might recognize him.

Andrew squeals and throws himself into his uncle’s arms for a quick hug before running to the swings. John watches until he assures himself he’s safe, and then glares down at his brother-in-law. “Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got a serious problem?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Mycroft says breezily, and offers him a coffee, which John takes only because he’s already dead on his feet.

It’s a beautiful late summer day, warm enough for short sleeves. It’s early enough yet in the afternoon that there are only a few children with their parents, and John can see Andrew easily, zipping in and out of the jungle gym in his bright red shirt. He’s so clumsy, his son, forever tripping on things and trying to keep his feet, even as excitement has him dashing around with the pent up energy that John had been desperate to siphon off.

He sits next to Mycroft, sighs into the coffee. “What brings you over here?”

“A favor.”

That surprises him. “A favor? What favor?”

Suddenly, he notices the lines in Mycroft’s face -- the man is never anything less than utterly pristine, and nobody else would even notice the ruffle at his collar, the slight smudge on a shoe, the tension written in his muscles, but John does. “Everything alright?”

Mycroft sighs, taps his long fingers along the handle of his umbrella. “It depends on what you’d describe as ‘alright’.” His mouth purses, and John sees echoes of Adella in that expression. “John, my sister-in-law called this morning to let us know she’s pregnant.”

“What? Mahdavi’s sister? Didn’t she just get married?”

“Exactly four months ago,” Mycroft affirms. There’s a lull in their conversation; children are running and laughing and screaming, little voices raised with joy to be playing. “I’m not certain if I’ve ever told you this, or if my brother let on, but Mahdavi and I have been trying for almost five years.”

John frowns sharply. “No, I didn’t -- have you been to a doctor?”

“Doctors, specialists. Mahdavi has a mild form of endometriosis, which doesn’t make conception impossible, just difficult. We’ve been through two ectopic miscarriages.”

It’s startling to hear him talk like that. Normal. Human. “I’m so sorry, Mycroft.”

His brother-in-law glances across at him. “Tanvi’s news couldn’t have come at a worse time.”

John leans back into the bench. Andrew falls, chasing after a little boy, and after a moment where he’s unsure if he’s going to cry, takes off running again. “Mycroft, I don’t know what I can do to help you. My specialty is in emergency medicine -- I can put you into contact with some specialists I know, and the clinic that Sherlock and I used for Andrew, if you and Mahdavi are interested in something like that.”

Mycroft shakes his head. “That isn’t what I was asking, John, but I thank you.”

“Then what? What help could I be?”

“Just you, and Andrew.” Mycroft sighs. “Last month, when you stayed with us for that long weekend -- I haven’t seen my wife that animated and wholly herself in longer than I care to think about. Having the house full of life did wonders for her. She is one of twelve brothers and sisters, and I fear that the silence in our home is beginning to wear her nerves thin.”

“You want us to come and stay?” It’s a surprising request, but not one John thinks he can -- or would -- turn down. Mahdavi is part of his family, and if having he and Andrew for a visit would help... “Of course. But I -- how long?”

“As long as you would be comfortable with.”

John frowns. “You do know what you’re asking, right? A two year old running around your house, breaking your things, experimenting on the dog? The screaming, the arguing, the whining, the smell?”

A smile breaks out on Mycroft’s face. “Yes. All of that.”

And John, god help him, knows he means it.

**

It’s unsettling, how well Andrew takes to Mycroft’s home.

Downing Street is lovely, a world far removed from the way John grew up, a world that suits Mycroft, and Andrew, to the ground. His son is young still, but John can already see the fine bold features he would have, the tumble of wild blond curls the girls would go crazy over. He watches Andrew running and playing with Mycroft's dog and sees his son as a young man, elegant and handsome and impossibly aristocratic.

What unsettles him most, however, is that Andrew is flourishing in a way he hadn’t been when he was alone with John. Almost overnight he blossoms -- he has play dates with the children of politicians and romp classes with Mahdavi, and an enormous bedroom of his own with his books and his toys and his blocks that he keeps clean without being prompted. His speech and vocabulary grow by leaps and bounds, and he finally conceptualizes multiplication, scribbling out numbers on the enormous rolls of butcher paper Mahdavi gets for him to color on. He's happy in a way he hasn't been for a long time, and as days turn to weeks, and John watches him grow and thrive, a thought he’s been trying to ignore for longer than he cares to admit takes seed. It’s a stupid thought, an awful thought, but as he lies down to rest every night it’s with him, whispering in his ear. Andrew is young still, young enough not to remember, even as his third birthday comes ever closer. In time he would forget, as all young children did.

One Sunday morning, two months after going to stay with Mycroft, John leaves Andrew at home with Mahdavi and goes to the shop for nappies, and without actually realizing what he’s doing, finds himself at a solicitors, drawing up a will. He’s been meaning to do it for so long, and now is a good a time as any. He has it notarized by a man Sherlock had once helped, Mr. Turney, a lovely old chap who does it for him free of charge.

When he returns to Mycroft's house, Sherlock is standing in the foyer.


	2. Chapter 2

John knows, with sudden, distressing clarity, exactly what it feels like to snap. His mind has given him the image of Sherlock, in the front hall of Mycroft’s home, gaunt and pale with his hair shorn to the root, holding their son in his arms. John opens his mouth to say something, to form Sherlock’s name, but the words never come.

Mycroft is standing in the doorway to the sitting room, staring at him, and John looks past the phantom image of Sherlock to his brother-in-law. "Sorry, I -- sorry. The baby asleep then?" He tugs his jacket off, juggling his shopping bag, and hangs it up in the cupboard. "I hope I wasn't gone long. Did he go down alright?"

Mycroft's face is as white as a sheet. "Yes," he says eventually, and closes his eyes for a moment as if in pain. "He was fine. Mahdavi read to him until I got home."

John checks his watch. "I'll give him another hour to sleep then, or it'll be impossible to get him down tonight. Would you like some tea?"

"I—” Mycroft stops, clears his throat. “Yes, thank you. That would be lovely."

The kettle is still on the stove from that morning, and John watches Mycroft walk into the kitchen from the corner of his eye, watches Sherlock trail in after him. "How was the meeting? Go alright?" he asks, taking down the cups.

"You might say that," Mycroft answers. "Did you get your errands finished?"

"Yes, finally. Mahdavi is a saint for watching Andrew. You know how he hates having to go around town in that rolling monstrosity your mother bought me." In the reflection of the fridge Andrew has wrapped his small arms around Sherlock's neck, squeezing him tight like he sometimes did to John on hard nights. He'd been doing it since he was a baby, since long before his tiny arms reached all the way around John's neck.

"The Fendi isn't quite made for London," Mycroft says. "John, could I speak to you about something?”

"Of course," John says, takes out the milk. "Hold on a moment though, if you could? I just want to go and check on Andrew."

"John," Mycroft murmurs, with infinite tenderness.

Somehow, the milk carafe has shattered at John's feet. He can't quite look down at it, or move to clean it up. "No," he says.

"John--"

" _No_ ," John repeats, looks past him to Sherlock, wild and disheveled and banged up and mottled with bruises, with Andrew's head on his shoulder and his beautiful green eyes gone red.

He thinks maybe he'd have ended up on the floor with the shattered remains of the carafe if Mycroft hadn't grabbed him before he could. He presses his face against a wide shoulder, shakes like a tree in a storm, because it isn't real _it isn't real_ , in October it would be the second anniversary of Sherlock's death, and he and Andrew would take flowers to Papa's grave and then they would spend the day looking at photo albums and making Papa a cake, because he had always loved chocolate almond and though John _despised_ it after Andrew went to sleep he would sit on the sofa and eat the cake and talk to him, tell him about their son’s school and his friends and his _life_ until his voice was hoarse and his body was numb.

John's vision goes dark, and he's grateful for Mycroft's strong arms around his shoulders.

**

It takes a very long time for the milk to shatter against the floor. It’s as if they’re caught in a time dilation, two moving bodies going in opposite directions. Everything is noise roaring in Sherlock’s ears and the eeriest of silences; it’s the most peculiar sensation he’s ever felt, as if he’s sure that if he looked down he would have seen himself as nothing but vessels and capillaries, slug-slow blood pumping wearily through his exposed veins. It’s a feeling of being a specimen on a table and nothing at all like that -- it’s a clenching somewhere low and deep he can’t identify, and the roiling of his stomach, and a pounding between his ears.

It’s John, milk and glass at his feet, staring at him with an expression Sherlock never wants to see on another human being ever again.

For a blank moment there isn’t recognition in his eyes, and John looks at him as if he’s a stranger before his body suddenly stages a revolt. Sherlock watches, helpless, Andrew’s fingers tangled in his collar, as John shakes like a tree in a hurricane. The blood drains out of his face as if a tap has been turned on, leaving him so white he’s almost blue.

" _No_ ," John says, stumbling backwards, and it’s only Mycroft’s quick reaction that keeps him from joining the shattered ceramic on the floor. He can do nothing but observe, _always observing_ , as Mycroft holds John tightly and John makes a keening sound like a wounded animal, setting all the hair on Sherlock’s body on end and breaking some vestigial remnant of his heart he hadn’t even known was there.

It only lasts for a few seconds before John sags, eyes rolling up into the whites in a way Sherlock has never seen him do. He struggles for a few moments to remain conscious, limbs jerking, and then Sherlock can simply observe no more, burying his face into Andrew’s hair as his son squirms and fights against him to be free. “Daddy, Daddy!” Andrew shrieks, panicked, over and over, louder and more strident when John doesn't respond. The milk pools around ceramic shards, and Andrew starts to cry.

" _Sherlock_ ,” Mycroft says, stern in a way Sherlock can only remember from a handful of incidents. Andrew is crying loudly now, desperate, hiccupping sobs, and Sherlock pulls him in close, presses his face there against the fontanel that has long since knit closed, the very evidence of Sherlock’s absence. “Sherlock,” Mycroft says again, but Sherlock just shakes his head, curls around his son and holds him, probably much too tight.

After a while -- an undetermined amount of time Sherlock mentally stands back, in awe at the complete mess he's made of his life and everyone else’s -- Sherlock hears Mycroft move, shift around and start to pick John up. He should set Andrew down, he should be the one to do it, but he can't, he really can't, can't drag his head above the thousand threads of thought that have tangled together in irredeemable knots. Mycroft carries John away and Sherlock doesn't move, has to fight just to pick up his head to watch him go.

At some point, between watching his brother leave the room -- the long line of his frame, John’s arms hanging listlessly -- Sherlock finds himself on the floor. Andrew screams in his ears in a flurry of tears and Sherlock watches the milk trace the tile grout, eventually wetting the cuff of his weather-beaten, filthy trousers. He watches it for a long time, so he won’t have to see Mycroft going up the stairs, so he won’t have to see how small John looks cradled in his arms like a child.

Eventually Mycroft comes back, puts a hand on Sherlock's shoulder. Sherlock slowly uncurls from around his son, who has fallen asleep after expending all of his energy in tears, his head tilted awkwardly on Sherlock's chest, his glasses shoved up on his forehead. Sherlock stares down at him, marveling at his features, the length of his fingers, the up-turned tilt of his nose.

"Come along,” Mycroft says, and has to help Sherlock stand, all his muscles gone stiff, the arm he's using to hold Andrew screaming at him. He staggers after Mycroft, out of the kitchen, down the hall, up the stairs, to the room John's been sleeping in. He flinches at the sight of all of John's things, at the pictures of Andrew, the pictures of himself. He puts Andrew down gently next to John, takes off his glasses and watches as Andrew grips John's shirt in his fists, snuffles into his chest. Sherlock crawls on to the bed and stretches out next to them and has never belonged somewhere less, here with two people he doesn’t know anymore.

He wraps his arm around them both, selfish, selfish.

Mycroft closes the door as if from far away, but Sherlock’s eyes are only for his family. John, skin waxy and white and damp with sweat, is still shuddering even now; his eyes move under his eyelids, his fingertips jerk, but slowly, with each pass of Sherlock’s hand through his hair, down his back, he relaxes, shifting from unconsciousness to exhausted sleep. Andrew hiccups now and again, the physical remnant of his hysterical crying, and Sherlock tries to calm him too, awkward fingers in his downy hair.

He’d thought that here, being home, would feel like the prize at the end of the race. Instead he feels nothing at all.

It’s a long while later, when the sun has passed over its zenith and started its slow descent, that John opens his eyes. They are so very blue in the pallor of his face, blood-shot and bruised, as if he’d gone two rounds with a boxer and lost.

He reaches out, touches a fingertip to the cut along Sherlock's lower lip. His touch is warm, bringing with it a host of memories Sherlock can only half-recall. John traces his cheekbones, up to his fringe, painfully short, to his earlobe, right along the healing seam where he’d got the ear pierced. He touches a new scar on Sherlock’s jaw line, the contusions on his face, the row of half-healed stitches in his hairline. Sherlock watches him catalog each change and wishes he could slip right into John’s thoughts, see what he’s thinking, feel what he’s feeling, because his ability to read John has left him. All he can do now is watch John’s face for any trace of familiarity, some hint that this will be okay. He wants John to hold him, or punch him, or kill him – _some_ reaction, some idea into what he’s thinking.

John gives him nothing. "How are you here?" he asks, almost to himself.

"I lied,” Sherlock answers anyway, the words tumbling out. "I lied and I ran.” It isn’t enough, even he knows that. All this time and he hadn’t thought once what in bloody fuck he was going to say. “I had a job to do."

There is a long pause while John looks at him, blinking like he expects Sherlock to disappear from one second to the next. "You're really here,” he says after a while. "You... this whole time..." He takes a steadying breath. "How long before you leave again?"

Sherlock tries not to wince. "I'm not. It's done. I'm not leaving."

John stares at him, watchful, too wary. Sherlock feels like a convicted criminal, on trial, awaiting sentencing. He can’t remember what he was expecting his return to be like, but this wasn’t it. "Is that a lie too?"

Sherlock shakes his head. "No."

John disentangles himself from Andrews, sits up on the bed with his back to Sherlock. He turns back around almost instantly, as if he can't help himself, as if he has no idea what he should be doing. That makes two of them, then. "Congratulations,” he says without a trace of sarcasm, "on your success." When Sherlock looks at him blankly he clarifies, "The work comes first."

Sherlock's not sure what the corresponding emotion is, but the sensation is not unlike being slapped. He instinctively tries to curl up but can't, not with the damage to his stomach, and he freezes, trying not to make it worse. John catches the look. "What? What’s wrong?"

For the first time in eighteen months, Sherlock laughs.

**

They've been installed back in Baker Street for two weeks now, and Sherlock finds himself completely at a loss. All of their things are back exactly as they were before, courtesy of Mycroft and his entirely inappropriate spying, but none of it feels the same. They skirt through the first week in a haze of confused half-explanations and discussions of everything but what matters.

 _The work comes first_ John said, says constantly, with every look, every abandoned touch. And he'd be right, if this were about anything else; in any case Sherlock finds himself letting John function under the inaccurate analysis, unwilling to explain further. He doesn't know where he'd even begin, or what it would prove. He can't apologize for leaving, because he'd had no choice but to go; he can't apologize for the traumatizing nature of his return, because it was unavoidable. It would all be so pointless, and he's had enough of that to last him a lifetime.

So they drift aimlessly -- no plan, no direction. They eat and sleep and clean and hover around each other, leave with no real purpose only to return empty-handed. Lestrade punches Sherlock in the jaw the first time he comes to the Yard, and is currently not speaking to him; Mrs. Hudson bursts into tears every time she sees him. Mycroft has turned his disapproving expression and cutting asides into living art. Mummy, however, is still the same when Sherlock treks out to see her, the perpetual rock in the storm. She tells him he looks dreadful and ushers him out the door after less than an hour, demanding he get back to his family.

Sherlock is also at a loss for what to make of their son -- _his_ son, who has Sherlock to thank for his features, his brain, his _existence_ , such as it is -- who doesn't know him or need him or particularly seem to like him either.

Once the novelty of his arrival passes it becomes clear that Andrew doesn't trust Sherlock. He'll try to engage Sherlock in his games and then tell him to go, unsure why he's still around and completely aware that he's upsetting John, even if he doesn't know why. The first time John tries to leave them alone Andrew flings himself at John, and then the door, and then the floor, and finally Sherlock, more out of capitulation than any real affection. Sherlock doesn't blame him.

Andrew is brilliant, that much is obvious, but he's still a toddler, and Sherlock is never quite certain what he really understands. They'll have a long discussion about what happens when a finger touches something hot, where Andrew will explain how _heat goes from one thing into some other thing and then that other thing, it burns,_ but as soon as John pulls a pan straight from the oven and places it on the counter Andrew will try to reach for it. He's unsteady on his feet and not remotely skilled with his hands and utterly _incapable_ of not walking into walls or doors or table corners when he doesn't have his glasses on, which for reasons Sherlock doesn't understand is as often as the child can manage it. Just the mention of eye-patches sends him into hysterics. He only seems interested in using the toilet as a place to experiment and get things stuck inside.

He's also dreadfully attached to his schedule, which Sherlock's arrival has largely scattered to the winds. He has screaming, tearful fits when John can't get them out the door by ten past eight, or has to push supper to half six. Sherlock doesn't get involved because he doesn't know _how_ to, has no idea what childcare or discipline for an almost three-year-old entails. The few times he tries John brushes him off or takes over; in the interests of accuracy Sherlock quite honestly lets him.

The one and only way in which they connect is, unexpectedly, via French. John enrolled Andrew in a bilingual school (and Sherlock is most certainly not imagining the shadowy hand of his family influencing that decision or its outcome) and their son is now largely fluent, despite not speaking a word of it at home. Sherlock himself has been unable to shake off the habit of speaking French, or with a heavy French accent, as a way to further distance himself from his English identity, and still has to consciously remind himself of where he is now, whom he's speaking to.

It takes a slip on his end one day, a warning to Andrew in French to mind his milk cup before it falls off the table, for Andrew to easily respond in kind. He rights his cup and tells Sherlock with an accent that could pass him off as a Parisian native, "The cup won't spill because Daddy put a lid on it.”

"Unless you plan to drink it on the floor it should still stay on the table,” Sherlock answers, responding in French automatically. He’s not eating, and neither is John -- though he’s going through the motions in a way that suggests he thinks Andrew is buying it, even though clearly he’s not -- but they both make an effort to drink their tea, if only for a way to occupy themselves. They certainly aren’t about to talk to one another.

Andrew gives him a look, and pauses, like he's not sure if he should ask. Unsurprisingly his curiosity overrides his caution in about three seconds. "You say that funny."

"Your great-grandmother's influence,” Sherlock says, raising an eyebrow. Most _adults_ didn’t notice the difference in his accent from the French they heard in the capital.

Andrew’s eyes light up and he instantly demands Sherlock explain, in absolute detail, why he sounds different, so Sherlock does. It takes him a full minute to realize he's smiling while he speaks.

They've been discussing it for almost ten minutes before Sherlock realizes John is watching them across the table, a lost expression on his face. Sherlock isn’t sure what it’s about, but he can tell it has _nothing_ to do with not understanding what they're saying.

"Do you ever try to teach your father French?" he asks Andrew, automatically turning their son’s plate when he reaches for his food and almost dips his arm in sauce instead.

"Uncle Mycroft said Daddy has a terrible accent, Daddy say he's right,” Andrew explains, before stuffing a chicken nugget in his mouth.

"’Said’, and that's probably true,” Sherlock agrees.

John jerks his chair back from the table and gets up, stalks out of the kitchen like someone petrified and determined not to show it. They both watch him go, surprised and unsure. Sherlock debates going after him, but he’d forgotten for a few minutes what it was like to what it was like to have a conversation that didn't end in shouted accusations.

He leaves John alone.

After a moment Andrew continues, "Where is great-gram-gram-"

"Great-grandmother,” Sherlock finishes. "She died a long time ago."

"Like you?" Andrew innocently asks.

Sherlock doesn't expect the way his body freezes, and that makes it worse, more fitful. "No," he says, harsher than he means to. "Not like me. People don't normally come back once they're dead."

"Daddy say you were up in the heaven,” Andrew explains, grabbing his milk and slurping it, somehow still managing to get it all over himself despite the much-heralded 'spill-proof' lid.

“‘Said’,” Sherlock corrects again. He can't help but make a noise of derision -- at John for his stupid platitudes, at the irony, at himself. "I was much closer than that."

"Where was you?" Andrew asks, eyes wide and guileless.

"’Were’, not ‘was’. I was trawling around in the muck,” Sherlock says, and when Andrew stares at him blankly, “I was looking for someone."

"Did you find him?"

Sherlock nods, finally notices his hands are in fists on his knees, finds himself unable to release them. "I found them; not before they found me first."

"Sherlock."

Sherlock looks up, startled. John's returned, his expression more foreboding than it’s been since the first few days, when John had a constant look about him, like he was barely restraining himself from physical violence. He glances between Sherlock and Andrew. "I don't know what you're talking about, but I know it's nothing good -- _stop it._ "

Sherlock stands up, more awkward than he'd like given the still sore wound on his abdomen, another stunning addition to the ever-growing collection. "You explain it to him then," he says, waving his hands in Andrew’s direction, and stalks off, slamming the door to the bedroom as he goes. John doesn’t come after him.

They end up in the A&E sixteen hours later, because instead of getting better the pain gets worse, until Sherlock is tumbling in a heap onto the kitchen floor, shocked by his body’s betrayal and unaware of how to get it back under his control.

He finds out later he apparently gave up his antibiotics too quickly and developed an abscess under the worst of his abdominal injuries. He's groggy and uncoordinated for four days after an emergency procedure, and John looks ready to kill him even as he takes care of him, as he gives Sherlock medicine and wipes his brow. He seems to really think Sherlock did this deliberately, when in fact it’s the only part of this whole farce that he actually didn’t plan.

In those four days Sherlock occasionally hears himself making vague mental apologies, often in different languages, confessing his sins, begging absolution. He jealously loathes everyone who’s seen John when he couldn't, talked to him, touched him. He threatens people he's never met, angrily curses them for usurping what was his the moment he was gone. And there _was_ someone else, Sherlock is sure of it. He doesn’t know what happened to them or where they are now but that doesn’t negate the truth. He has never wanted to ruin someone the way he does this stranger, this ghost.

He hates John more for letting someone else close, and pretends not to feel an ounce of guilt at the thought. He can’t delude himself, though, no matter how he tries; even in his delirium he knows it doesn’t matter what John did, or who he did it with -- Sherlock can't leave again. He wouldn't survive it. He's exhausted and estranged from the only people who have ever mattered and after spending two years dead he's not sure he's come back at all, because he doesn't remember living as being so hideously painful.

He hears John tell him to stop talking, but he didn’t think he had been, and he's pulled under before he can argue the point.

**

Caring for Sherlock is the living embodiment of torture.

The fevers that always struck with abdominal injuries have come and gone, and the fresh scar Sherlock has added to his collection is healing beautifully -- but then again of course it is, those are John's stitches, that is his work, that is his care. On the fourth day there isn't any weeping discharge or blood, so John makes the decision as his primary physician to take him home. He tries to convince himself it's because Sherlock has healed enough to recover in comfort, but in his heart of hearts he knows it's a lie -- Sherlock hasn't done well since his surgery, lethargic and listless and so _un_ Sherlock that John doesn't think he can physically _stand_ it for one more minute.

The problem is that John had thought taking Sherlock home would be easier. The reality couldn't have been further from the truth.

Sherlock is helpless, for those first few days. The most basic of functions, from sitting up to putting his shirt on, are utterly beyond him. He needs John for everything, his expression twisted and tortured at every request until John comes to dread it, begins to anticipate Sherlock's needs so that he wouldn't be forced to face that expression each and every time -- the very personification of pain. A week in and a sick panic begins to eat away at John's belly, a panic he doesn't understand but which nevertheless makes his hands shake and his stomach churn.

"I need to have a shower," Sherlock says.

John looks up, the corner of the blanket in hand. It's Thursday night, a full week since Sherlock suddenly collapsed in the kitchen, face white as a sheet. The quick fold and tuck under the mattress buys John a few seconds, stroking Andrew's hair where he's sprawled asleep by Sherlock's legs a few more. "Feeling filthy?" he finally asks.

He looks filthy, his short hair stuck to his head with sweat, skin waxy and pale. John doesn't wait for him to answer and peels Sherlock's shirt back, untapes the bandage on his abdomen so he can inspect the small laparoscopic wound and avoid his eyes. Before the war he'd insisted on patients keeping their surgical sites dry until stitches were ready to come out, but Afghanistan had taught him that once incisions ran clear it was time for a bath. Sometimes, there was nothing more healing that simple water.

He prods the small seam carefully -- healthy and pink. "Alright," he says.

The trek to the bathroom takes forever, first because they have to rearrange Andrew so he won't tumble off the bed -- which he hadn't done in ages -- and second because Sherlock walks hunched over and slow like an old man, one arm protectively over his belly.

John helps Sherlock to sit on the closed toilet seat, and goes about preparing the bath. He sweeps Andrew's bath toys out of the empty tub, puts his bath bubbles on a different shelf and out of the way. He can feel Sherlock's eyes on him and does his best to ignore them, fussing with towels and soap until he finds himself on his knees before the tub and there's simply no choice but to look up into Sherlock's gaze.

Sherlock reaches out to touch his face and John jerks back, as if scalded, before helplessly, helplessly leaning forward just slightly into his touch. His throat burns and he turns away again, turning the water on. "It won't be as hot as you like, but you don't want to irritate your incision," he says to Andrew's bottle of shampoo.

"How much longer, John?"

"For the bath? About ten minutes."

"John," Sherlock murmurs, brushes John’s cheek with his fingertips. "How much longer?"

It is the one question John can't answer. After a moment Sherlock exhales and begins the slow process of unbuttoning his shirt, so John sets about helping him, untucking his slippers from his feet, peeling down his socks. Sherlock's feet, ugly and white and long, make him want to cry, a host of memories of those feet tucked between his legs, tangled with his on the sofa, curled over his shoulder, are each as painful as a blade.

It's torture, caring for Sherlock, being so close to him and yet so far away, and now, here, on his knees between Sherlock's thighs, one long, pale foot in his hand, he has the courage to press his forehead to Sherlock's knee and, tears clogging his throat, ask the question that has echoed so fiercely in his head that sometimes he thought he'd die from the tumble of emotions it carried. "Why did you leave me?"

**

Sherlock freezes, his blood running cold. He's tried, he's tried so hard to think of ways to explain, and here is John asking him the question in the one way to which Sherlock has no answer. "I--"

John is frighteningly pale and small, so undeniably weary, so undeniably perfect, endlessly fascinating, utterly brilliant, everything Sherlock isn't, couldn't hope to be. He falls apart at Sherlock's knee and Sherlock for one split second wishes he really were dead, so he wouldn't have to bear witness to it.

"John. _John_ ,” he says it desperately, voice hoarse, slides painfully off the seat onto the ground, curling around John, silently begging him not push Sherlock away. "Please,” Sherlock says, and he's selfish, always so selfish, but he can't change who he is, how badly he needs John to stay with him just this once.

After a long moment, when they’re both unsure what John’s going to do, John presses his forehead against Sherlock's chest, right over his heart, even now wary of aggravating Sherlock's injury. Sherlock leans in gratefully, presses his face into John's hair. The smell -- almost two years later and John's still using the exact same shampoo -- very suddenly shoves him up against the wall of what he can take.

" _I didn't have a choice_ ,” he says savagely. He feels John start against his chest, surprised by the brutal fury, but it's too late now, Sherlock is too tired, in too much pain, hurting in too many places and ways to keep a lid on it in that moment. "I never had a choice. They took _everything_ from me," he snarls, his fists gripping the back of John's shirt, "made me run like a fugitive, like _I'd_ done something wrong, made me go to ground like an animal. And I--"

The words shrivel up in his throat and die, but his own stubbornness makes him try again. "I--"

John pulls back to look up at him, his eyes rimmed red, wide and worried. "Sherlock--"

" _No_ ," Sherlock says, shaking his head, frustrated beyond reason. "I would have-- if I--" He grits his teeth, feeling like something in him is about to snap.

"It's okay, Sherlock--"

" _It's not okay_ ," Sherlock yells, "and I'm _sorry_ , Jesus Christ I'm sorry, staying would -- I couldn't risk --" He suddenly realizes he's almost hyperventilating, and is sweating, and his stomach is screaming bloody murder at him, and he groans as the agony hits him in the base of his skull.

"Sherlock, Sherlock breathe,” John says, pulls Sherlock's head into his lap as Sherlock instinctively curls around his injury. Sherlock doesn’t try to say anything else.

**

Mycroft answers the door on the second ring.

He isn't surprised to see John standing in his doorway, not after the past few weeks -- only that it took him so long to get there. His heart breaks for him, because if anything he looks worse than he did before, and one wrong word away from physical violence. No one, Mycroft thinks, should have to go through what his brothers were enduring.

John asks, vibrating, eyes wet and fists clenched, "Did you know where he was? Did you lie to me the entire time?"

"No," Mycroft says immediately. " _No_ , John, I swear to you."

"But you knew he was alive."

Mycroft steps back. "Come in."

"No. Not... no. I don't want to come in, I just need to know. Did you know he was alive?"

"No," Mycroft answers. "I had no idea,” John takes a threatening step forward and Mycroft holds up his hands. “John, it’s true that I suspected, but I suspect everything of everyone. I have access to lines on inquiry others don't, as you know. I put my ‘feelers’ out, so to speak, but nothing came back."

They clearly aren't the words John wants to hear -- if anything the tremulous hold he has on his emotions wears even thinner. “I’m not stupid, you know, no matter what your family thinks of me. On the run, that long, Sherlock needed money -- my accounts and the trust fund stayed the same, so if he didn’t come to you, then he clearly went to his mother. But you see, it _has_ to be you, because your mother called me every week, and sent me things for the baby, and invited me to the estate. We spent half the summer there last year, for Christ’s sake. I refuse to believe she wouldn’t tell me that my partner was alive. That I was grieving for _nothing_.”

It was always heartbreaking to see the machinations of his mother have such a painful effect on those she was manipulating. Worse still when one had been in the position to be manipulated. “John,” he says, helpless.

He presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Oh God. Oh, my God.”

Mycroft has never felt so utterly _useless_. John pulls his hands away and his face is wet but his eyes are hard. “Tell me not to drive to Ascot.”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” Mycroft answers, quiet. “I can only tell you that I know my mother very well. It was at Sherlock’s request that she keep her peace, and the price has been undoubtedly high.”

John’s face twists – Mycroft can only imagine what Sherlock has been like. Gone is the proud, brilliant young man, and in his place is a hollow shell. After all, only the two of them could ever know what had happened to Mummy after Father’s death, and only the two of them would ever understand why she did as she did. To see history repeating itself is more painful than Mycroft could have imagined.

John comes in and Mycroft leads him to his office, to the liquor cabinet where he pours them both a finger of scotch, and then an extra splash more. It’s the sort of day for alcohol.

“Tell me,” he says.

He listens to John talk, and rage, and scream, lets John break his three hundred year old glass when he lets it fly against the opposite wall. He listens and doesn’t say a word – not about Sherlock, not about Mummy, not about the government or his upcoming bid for party leader, and most certainly not about the hole he so recently discovered Sebastian Moran dead in.

**

"You want to know what I was doing,” Sherlock asks as the door opens. He's sitting on the sofa, the same sofa they had before, but entirely new, and entirely wrong, and in that sense it fits in perfectly. He's sitting with his hands steepled over his lips, his eyes staring into the middle distance, same as they've been for the last thirty minutes.

John pauses over the threshold. "Sleeping, I hope. Where's Andrew?"

"With Mrs. Hudson. You want to know what I was doing the last year and a half,” he rephrases, shifting his gaze to John, who, surprise surprise, turns away at the exact same moment.

John pulls off his coat, hangs it up, shuts the door slowly. He stares down at his hand on the knob like the key to life is written over it. When he turns back there's a look on his face Sherlock _despises_ , an expression that says _Just put up with him._ Sherlock's seen this look on countless other people in his life but never John, never like this. Not until he came back.

It's never been so infuriating, so painful, slices through him like a physical injury. "Don't let me interrupt any plans you had," he snaps, cutting back as sharply as he can, "if you were thinking of going back out to see my brother again, or whoever else you spend all your time with now." The last few words are dipped in bile-colored jealously, loathsomely obvious.

John looks like the only thing keeping him from murder is the shock. "Do you actually _realize_ what you just fucking said to me?"

"Here's a question, in short enough words you can understand: why, if you wanted to know what I was doing, or who else was involved, wouldn't you ask _me_?"

"So you can have a breakdown on the floor again?" John says, his fists clenched at his sides. He's been crying to Mycroft, literally crying, because Sherlock can risk his life for John but that doesn't mean he deserves to see him vulnerable. Mycroft, with his steady words and steady tone and steady fucking hand can be the one to comfort, while Sherlock reaches out only to see John flinch away.

"I don't make the same mistake twice,” Sherlock answers.

“No, you find new ones every day,” John snaps. He’s livid and in pain, always so much pain, it's just got worse and worse as each day goes by and Sherlock doesn't know in this inevitable slide whether he'll survive reaching rock bottom. He thinks perhaps they are only a few steps away. "I was hunting someone,” he says, lets it sound feral, feels barely civilized anymore at all.

"Why?" John asks, steps forward, limps slightly and makes Sherlock's stomach clench at the sight of it.

"Because he threatened you. He threatened our son. Because he was going to take what was mine. _Because he was an ignorant little cockroach and he deserved to die_ ," Sherlock snarls. He cuts himself off and tries to find something that doesn't make him so angry he can't speak, settles for John's hands, which don't make him angry so much as desolate and lonely. "You know of a business man who died on a trip to Sun City? 'A victim of sectarian violence', was the official byline, I believe."

"Yeah, it was all over the news... the South Africans said they had nothing to do with it. Adair something."

"Ronald Adair,” Sherlock says, nodding. "It took me seventeen months to get close enough to kill him."

It isn’t surprising, which John thinks is probably the most surprising thing of all. Intellectually he’d known all of that already; he’d known Sherlock wouldn’t have left him for any other reason except life or death, but his heart is screaming otherwise, and he feels more than a little hysterical, and far too small for all the emotions filling him up full. His mouth is entirely out of his control – he wants to hurt as much as he hurts. “Let me get this straight -- you want me to _thank_ you for leaving the way you did? Is that what you’re angling for?”

“Fuck you,” Sherlock snarls.

“Fuck _you_ , you self-important prick. I know you, don’t I? Know you so well, better than anyone else, so I know what a relief it was to be able to shake us off -- a run around the world without a family to hinder you.” He’s shaking, furious, hands clenched into fists. He’s spoiling for a fight, wants it so badly he can taste it. “It must have felt so good, to get up and go whenever you chose, without worrying about anything or anyone. I should have seen the signs before, how stupid could I possibly be – you’ve done it to me all the while, with Moriarty, with _India_.”

Sherlock’s fury is just as incendiary, as mindlessly destructive. Sherlock stands up, stares John down. “And how _easily_ you must have found a replacement for me, continuing on as if nothing was amiss. How easy to pack up and move in to my brother’s house, send Andrew on play dates and birthday parties and when you’re feeling generous throw out a few useless facts as to who his father actually is.”

John opens his mouth, practically vibrating with energy, his fists clenched down by his sides, but Sherlock cuts him off before he can even get started. “Your precious normality, finally restored. Nothing but banal foods in the fridge, no experiments around the flat, no one taking you off on ‘ridiculous’ cases. I’m sure you found it quite liberating, an excuse to be freed from guilt as you found someone better suited to join you in your idyllic little lifestyle.”

John is so angry he can’t speak, as if the anger in his guts had reached up and wrapped iron around his esophagus. “You unbelievable bastard,” he finally seethes, shaking with fury – he wants to throttle him, shake Sherlock to pieces. “What are you saying? That I’m a whore? Is that what you’re implying?”

“You _know_ me, John,” Sherlock mocks, snide, lips curved in a smirk in a far-too-pale face. “I never imply.”

It’s the wrong thing to say.

Before he’s fully conscious of what he’s doing John grabs a book from the sofa table and throws it, missing Sherlock only by a hair. A teacup with cold tea is next, the remote control, a lamp. None reach their mark but oh how John tries. “ _Fuck you_ ,” he roars, throws magazines like projectiles. “You died, you bastard, you _died and left me alone_. I had nowhere to go, nowhere to turn, it _doesn’t make me a whore_ to have accepted help from Mycroft.” Sherlock’s laptop hits the floor, smashes into a hundred pieces and it feels _good_ , he wants to continue until the entirety of Baker Street is brought to its knees. “I wanted to give Andrew better, to give him as normal a life as I could, so yes, I let him go to birthday parties and play dates, and no, I didn’t tell him about you every single day because I couldn’t breathe some days for missing you. I was alone and I did the best I could and you don’t ever get to say otherwise, _you have no right_ to _ever_ call into question what I did to survive without you.”

Sherlock doesn’t flinch from the destruction, is instead drawn to it, to John. “You wouldn’t be alive, you utter twit. If I hadn’t left you’d be long dead, shot in the head at King’s Cross, bleeding out into the street with our son. You think I was running off for fun? To pass the time? One final, grand adventure before I settled into the unending drudge of domesticity?”

He’s right in front of John, leans down into his space. “You think you know me so well, _so bloody well_ , but you’re just like the rest of them, always assuming the worst.” It comes out more defeatist than he intended. John’s expression falters, cracks open in a flicker before shutting back down; the sight of it burns Sherlock, and at the same time drains away some of his fury. “The things I did to get back to you -- I killed men, and shipped weapons, drugs, goods. Got fucked in every way imaginable -- well, almost,” he amends, “though it was close in Morocco.”

And the fury comes back, tenfold. John swings -- he can’t help it. Sherlock is far too quick to allow him to land it, something he would have regretted later anyway. Sherlock is wiry, strong, and they grapple, knocking over tables and lamps, scuffling furiously. John wants to hurt, and then just as suddenly his mouth is on Sherlock’s and he’s kissing him and kissing him, biting at his lower lip until he tastes blood.

He jerks to the left and sends them crashing against the coffee table, the floor, rolling, Sherlock moaning in pain under him from his fresh incision but John can’t stop, shoving Sherlock’s shirt and dressing gown up to mouth along the scar, to set his teeth on Sherlock’s nipples and his hand down Sherlock’s pajamas. “You bastard,” he snarls, pulling the elastic down under Sherlock’s erection, hard as rock. “You unbelievable bastard, I hate you,” and he sucks Sherlock’s cock down.

It’s sloppy -- painful memories mixed in with two years without. John tries to remember how to do it, how to hold his teeth back and hollow his cheeks and suck without hurting him -- even though he wants to, he wants to hurt and bleed him, wants Sherlock a wreck, howling, holding onto him with those thighs around his hips. It’s all he can think about, as Sherlock bucks and moans beneath him like he’s dying -- taking him, possessing him, _owning him_.

Sherlock’s yanks on John’s hair, sharp as he can, until John reluctantly pulls off him, his mouth red and wet, impossible to resist. They’re both so hard the slide of their cocks against each other hurts, and Sherlock groans into John’s mouth, while John curses him and pushes him away with one hand, drags him closer with the other.

“John,” Sherlock murmurs, ripping John’s trousers down, tearing his pants at the hip. John scrabbles against him, fingers scratching Sherlock’s shoulders, the juncture at his neck. “ _John_ ,” he says, while John calls him a bastard, and a son of a bitch, and a fucking monster. Sherlock doesn’t care, agrees with it all, but this scares him, and terrifies him in a way he could never, ever find words to explain. Almost two years and he wasn’t once unnerved the way he’s been every moment of the last three weeks, constantly on edge, on guard, always looking for something, some sign John was still in there, still his. He pulls John up into his lap, leans over him and presses his cock against the clutch of John’s hole. He gasps brokenly, desperate for the stuttered moans he hears in return.

He has no idea what he’s doing, they can’t -- not like this, without anything, no precautions -- but he can’t stop, smears his pre-come against John’s hole with his thumb, two years without his thumb there, where he loves it, where John loves it more, and lets loose a groan he hopes John can’t hear.

It’s good – it’s so devastatingly _good_ that John can’t hear past the screaming beat of his heart, his own ragged cries. Sherlock tears his pants, _tears_ them to get to his hole, and John bucks and shouts, overwhelmed with the feeling of these hands on him again, this smell all around him, the taste of Sherlock in his mouth. For a half-second he thinks maybe he really has lost his mind, that he’s in some twisted fantasy as he had experienced so many times since Sherlock’s death, but Sherlock is too vibrant and imperfect and flawed to be anything but real.

It doesn’t make the pain any less, only makes it worse, brings the anger to the fore. He _growls_ , drags Sherlock’s hand away from between his legs and sucks two of those long, fine fingers into his mouth. It won’t be enough to even begin with – he’s too tight, from so long without.

John stumbles off of Sherlock’s lap, gets caught in one trouser leg and shakes it off angrily. “Get your trousers off,” he commands, and makes it to the bathroom by sheer luck. His hands shake as he digs through the cabinets, the drawers, before finally finding his prize – Andrew’s baby oil.

He looks up into the mirror and is momentarily taken aback by what he sees – his mouth is bitten red, his hair is sticking up every which way, there are bruises already coming up on his throat, his arms, and his shirt is hanging by one button.

He stares at himself, wondering what the fuck he’s doing, until Sherlock appears in the bathroom doorway, nude and too thin and so unbelievably beautiful John can’t seem to breathe.

He tells Sherlock’s reflection, helpless, “I don’t have condoms, or lube, or anything, but -- I’m clean.”

It’s a very deliberate, very _considered_ answer, Sherlock thinks, striding into the bathroom and kissing John intensely. Both his hands are on John’s face, trying to pull him closer, pull him in. John groans desperately, almost drops the bottle in surprise as Sherlock bullies him against the sink. “Now,” Sherlock says, hitches John’s leg up, takes the bottle and fumbles it open. John thrusts against him awkwardly, and it’s so good, so intense Sherlock can barely stand it, drowning in the press of John’s body against his own.

With the first press of his fingers, John moans like Sherlock is actually, physically hurting him. Sherlock pauses but John just says, “Don’t, don’t stop,” and Sherlock moves his hand, sends his fingers probing, soon enough fast and brutal, desperate and unrelenting. He’s still angry -- distractingly so -- because he’s _earned_ this, spent two years fighting his way back to his family, to _John_ , and he doesn’t know if he can stand being told it’s not good enough. He twists his fingers, his hips moving in time, and sets his teeth on John’s neck, wanting to cover him, overwhelm him, send them down in flames together. Beneath him John cries out, and Sherlock unerringly touches him in all the places that used to make him fall apart.

It isn’t safe -- the very definition of unsafe. They don’t have protection, and there’s Andrew to think about, and so John tears his mouth away from Sherlock’s, drops his head to Sherlock’s shoulder to watch the muscles in Sherlock’s forearm work as he fingers John so perfectly. The burn feels good, so addictive, and it takes everything in him to say, “I don’t have condoms.”

“You already said that,” Sherlock says into his ear. “Touch yourself.”

“Sherlock—”

“Wrap your fingers around your cock, John.”

He’s helpless to obey, _helpless_. “Tell me,” he begs, fisting his cock wet and hard and _good_ , as Sherlock strokes inside. “Swear to me there wasn’t anyone else.”

“There was never anyone else,” Sherlock says, mouthing the words underneath John’s jaw. “I couldn’t do it,” he says, and even now could almost laugh at his own idiocy, what is sounding more and more like an unreciprocated choice. “A decision that almost got me killed, but I -- I couldn’t do it.” He considers for the hundredth time how stupid a way it would have been to die, and when the words come out they are embarrassingly unhinged.

Sherlock covers his slip by pushing another finger into John, three now, and then spreads them wide. John moans open-mouthed, his breath hot against Sherlock’s neck; in response Sherlock strokes his middle finger just so, determined to leave John as indefensible, as vulnerable as he feels. He’s about to crack apart -- from anger, from lust, from the things John engenders in him that he doesn’t know how to define, much less explain. He spares a thought to wonder if they are at the beginning of the end, the _real_ end, or if this is less destructive than it appears, less ruinous than it feels. He desperately hopes John can tell the difference, can _see_ what Sherlock wants it to be, even if he’s failed to make it happen. “ _Now,_ John,” Sherlock murmurs, and he pitches his voice as low as he can, hoping it will better hide all the things he doesn’t want John to hear.

It’s the worst thing John has ever done, and in the long, stupid history of his life by far the most reckless. He has no idea what Sherlock has done; John’s at war with his pragmatic side, the part of his brain telling him to stop being an idiot, to put together the _facts_. He wants so badly to believe Sherlock, to believe in some small way that here, naked and gasping against each other, is what Sherlock wanted, what he came back for. What’s worse, what’s infinitely worse is that the sick knowledge of that desperation doesn’t dim the pleasure, only makes it stronger, makes John buck and keen, wet and open and grasping. When Sherlock presses his mouth against John’s ear, those lips there at that spot connected directly to John’s cock, that dark, smoky voice murmuring for him to come, John does, helpless, with such force he cries out like the sound is being ripped up from his chest.

He sags, Sherlock’s mouth there against his neck like it always is after he’s come, tasting the salt over his racing pulse, the blood rushing right under the skin. It makes John want to weep so he presses his face right back, there against the curve of Sherlock’s chin, his collar bone.

It’s the worst thing he’s ever done; by the far the stupidest. But still, he finds himself taking Sherlock’s hand, pulling him into his bedroom -- their bedroom, their bed where John had laid in Sherlock’s coat night after night after night, until he realized that the smell of Sherlock’s hair, his cologne had faded from the heavy wool. It’s there now, all over him, in their bed again where Sherlock had been sleeping, in the man he presses back against the cool sheets, the man he climbs on top of, the man he leans down and kisses.

The flash-bang of anger is over, and John isn’t sure what they’re left with. He’s scared in a way that could only ever compare to his terror his first year in Afghanistan, the sick, permeating fear that sent him into cold sweats. At least there he’d known his enemy -- at least there he hadn’t felt so lost.

It doesn’t stop him from reaching back, thumbing Sherlock’s cock gone hard and slippery and tight. Doesn’t stop him from leading it into his body, working his hips until the pain fades and he sinks, slowly, surely, down.

Sherlock groans, gives up, gives in. His hands flutter pointlessly up and down John’s sides, his fingertips skimming ceaselessly. He has no idea what this means, whether the look in John’s eyes is damnation or absolution or both.

His entire body is tense, wound up uncomfortably tight. He shifts, hips moving instinctively, and watches John’s eyes slide shut. “John,” he says. Look at me. _See_ me.

John seems to understand, though in his haze Sherlock can’t determine how. Sherlock’s anger has deserted him, and in its wake left a wasteland of destruction and desperation. He’s thrusting harder now, in time with John’s slowly shifting hips. It’s so good, and painfully vivid after two years of fading memories. John leans over to kiss him, deep and yearning, the press of his mouth as soothing as it is incinerating.

When John pulls back Sherlock finds himself with his hands on John’s face, just holding. John lets him, stares back, his eyes still honest, still open, even after everything that’s happened. Sherlock tells himself to let go, and says it again, and again, and a few times in French as well. He can’t do more than move his thumbs, stroking lightly on John’s cheekbones. His brain has spiraled out of his control so fast it’s rendered incoherent and useless and utterly, utterly silent. “Please believe me,” he says instead, the words falling out of his mouth completely unconsidered. “I’ve only ever belonged with you.”

It’s truth, John can hear it in his voice, can see it in his face and it’s like a knife to the heart that keeps stabbing him over and over. John feels as if he’s been cleaved, part of him suffocating under an endless grief, a grief that’s for Sherlock as much as it is for himself, while the other part is grateful, understanding. He’s a doctor but he doesn’t know how to knit both parts of himself back together. He wants to scream and laugh and cry and he doesn’t know how to control it, how to bring himself back into equilibrium.

Sherlock is underneath him, _inside_ of him, beautiful and pale and begging in a way John is sure he’s never done; would never do again. It’s beautiful, it’s _Sherlock_ , and John rears up, clenches around Sherlock’s cock, overwhelmed until he’s sure his heart is going to pound up out of his chest. He grabs Sherlock when he reaches up to steady him and holds tight, squeezing, interlacing their fingers. He’s been soft, his cock disinterested until now, but he can feel the tug in his sac, the rush of pleasure as he starts to tighten, to fill. No fantasy could ever measure up to the real thing -- the smell of Sherlock’s skin, of his arousal, the taste of him trapped in the corners of John’s mouth, the feel of his rough hands as they hold him, the look in his eyes as he bucks up into the clutch of John’s body. He thought he’d never have it again but here he is, here they are.

He says, gasping, “I love you, Sherlock.” He tumbles down against him, kissing him, kissing him, lets Sherlock roll them over in the sheets, lets Sherlock press him down. “I love you. I love you so much.”

Sherlock thrusts in, _stays_ because he knows John loves it when Sherlock bottoms out, waits until John is ready to hit him just to get Sherlock to move already. “John,” he murmurs. He feels incapable of saying anything else, though the word has become synonymous with so many things in his life, the words he can’t force past his throat. It’s just one more way John amazes him, all the things he shares freely that Sherlock has never been able to manage.

It’s utterly intoxicating to have John wrapped around him, to feel the tight heat inside him. Sherlock’s hips piston, the spaces where their bodies meet hot and sweat slick. Sherlock reaches down, his fingers wrapping surely around John’s cock, his thumb sliding over the head. John groans and jerks up uncontrollably, shifting Sherlock inside him, making them both moan and shudder.

He knows he won’t last much longer, is still exhausted, bone deep weary, and so very aroused he’s almost lightheaded. He works John hard, free hand braced on the bed next to John’s head, thrusting as hard and deep as he can. Sherlock’s sac has gone tight, the noises John makes sparking right down to his prick, so intense it’s verging on painful. “Still?” he asks, wanting so desperately to believe him. “In spite of?” Sherlock is close, so close, and he leans down to kiss John, gasping against his mouth.

“Yes,” John whispers, there in the dark of Sherlock’s mouth, his heart clenched in a ball in his throat. He can’t ask Sherlock to say it, not if he doesn’t want to, because he knows better than anyone that it isn’t Sherlock’s way. He can’t ask but _oh_ how John needs to hear it, even though he already knows the truth of it in his heart; he needs it pressed into his skin, needs it whispered against his throat, needs it touched into his thighs and murmured into his cheek and kissed into his mouth. “Still. In spite of.”

Sherlock bumps up against his prostate, once, twice, and John wraps his legs tight around Sherlock’s waist, arches his hips so he’ll do it again, again. It’s a race to the finish now, the both of them gasping, moving -- it’s never been this fast, they’ve never reached the peak this soon, but it’s been such a long time and it’s never felt so good. Pleasure sparks along his nerve endings, up his spine with Sherlock’s thrusts. John is crying out now on every stroke, his cries echoing, the bed pounding against the wall, the slap of Sherlock’s hips. “Don’t you know?” he says, the words like shards of glass in his throat. “You’re the love of my life.”

Sherlock thrusts, one violent, rough pound inside, and John’s back bows and he comes all over them, heavy spurts that don’t seem to end, pleasure that doesn’t seem to stop, violent and beautiful and so, _so_ good. He shoves his wrist into his mouth to muffle the sounds he can’t help but make, ripped up out of his throat with such force that he shudders, bucking his hips with every surge.

It’s too much, it’s all too much, and Sherlock never wants it to end. He wants John crying out for him like this, just like this, for as long as he can manage it. He keeps thrusting through John’s orgasm, the tight clench as John bears down gorgeous, almost painful. He keeps going, pounds in again and again and again and again, until John’s cries are wordless, soundless, gasping screams.

“Sherlock, Sherlock,” John begs, and when Sherlock drops his head to John’s shoulder he feels John’s fingers cradling the back of his head. “I love you,” he mumbles into John’s collarbone, into his skin. The words barely audible. “I love you,” he says, and comes so hard he freezes, the world blanking out behind his eyes.

**

They don’t sleep, not in the strictest sense of the word. John goes downstairs to get Andrew, thanking Mrs. Hudson for babysitting, and the look she gives him is at once happy and so full of pity. John doesn't want to know what their fight must have sounded like echoing through the walls. His face gets hot, and he can't meet her eyes again, even when she gently pats his cheek.

Andrew is half-asleep, yawning even as John tucks him into bed, and kisses his little cheek, and snuggles Ribbit at his side. He's asleep before John closes the bedroom door.

Sherlock hasn't moved, and John finds it easy to get undressed and curl back under the blankets, against the warmth of Sherlock's side. They don't sleep; John strokes his fingers against the back of Sherlock’s neck for hours, Sherlock’s weight pressed to his side, Sherlock’s cheek there over his heart. He strokes and breathes and lets his mind drift, away from all that hurts and all that’s wrong to a time when this was all that he needed to get up each morning. It’s as if some part of himself is alive again, slotted right where it ought to be. He’s never been more scared of what that means.

They make love again during the night, the only light that of the street lamp outside Baker Street, pale on Sherlock’s white skin, along the prickly spikes where his hair used to curl. Somehow, they’re still awake when the sun comes up, lying there together. Before long he’ll have to go and wake Andrew up, get him fed and washed, get him ready for school, but John doesn’t want to interrupt the hush over their bed, not yet.

“I’m glad you came home,” he says, watching the way the slow lightening of the sky turns Sherlock’s bare shoulder from dark blue to the softest of pinks. He slides his fingers over it, tracing the invisible lines of color.

Honesty, Sherlock thinks. This is honesty, and vulnerability - two things he’s never been good with, never handled delicately enough. He tries to reciprocate because John does deserve it, because he wants John to get what he wants, and because John buried Sherlock and raised their son alone and the least Sherlock can do is explain why. “You shouldn’t say that,” he tells John.

“Why not?” John asks, his hands stilling.

“Because you don’t have all the available facts.” He’s sliding the words over John’s chest, timing them to the beat of John’s heart in his ear. “I killed a man in Nýrsko who reminded me of you,” he says, and props his chin up to look at John, like this is normal, traditional post-coital conversation. “The way he held himself, his stance. He was ex-military too, though not for reasons as honorable as yours. He wasn’t a good man, but I didn’t care about that; it was irrelevant, unnecessary information. I stuck a knife between his C4 and C5 vertebrae,” he continues, watching John’s face shift under the weight of this new information, “and I didn’t feel a thing.” He considers the past two years of his life. “I never felt much of anything. I’d forgotten what it was like.”

John is silent, and Sherlock can’t read his expression, striped by early morning light. Or maybe he just doesn’t want to. “I don’t know if I’m someone you’d be happy to have back. I don’t know if I’m the sociopath everyone expected me to be. And neither do you.” You can burn the humanity out of someone, Sherlock’s learned. Perhaps that’s what happened to him, all that rage from his wounded pride, fury at the injustice, the presumption. From where he is it’s hard to tell. “Would you like to know the rest?”

“Yes,” John says softly.

Sherlock turns over to lie on his back beside him, and it leaves John cold. He curls onto his side to stare at Sherlock’s profile there in the soft morning light, to watch Sherlock’s eyelashes cast shadows over his cheeks as he blinks. “It’s probably unsurprising to learn that he was involved in weapon and drug trafficking. But _stupidly_ I didn’t stop to consider that he might be involved in other trades, until I found a shipment of human cargo bound for South America.” He closes his eyes. “I couldn’t call the authorities, not when I was so close -- that was when I ran out of money the first time. I gave them what I could, but I didn’t call the police, I didn’t even help them find their families. Not a single one spoke a word of English -- barely any money, no homes, no jobs. Women and children left to fend for themselves.”

John brushes the backs of his fingers along the soft skin of his shoulder. “Sherlock,” he murmurs.

Sherlock turns his face away. “More?”

“All of it,” John tells him.

Sherlock nods shortly. He is perfectly calm from the beginning to end -- there is no inflection, no emotion, just the even-handed explanation of things that should never be uttered, much less shared. Death and carnage and lies, so many lies, deceptions piled so high he was lost in them, disappeared for weeks beneath their weight.

He cannot be entirely honest, but neither can he lie; too far in either direction and he’ll lose John anyway. There are things John doesn’t need to know about, persons involved who have no bearing on the things that matter. He won’t make this worse than it already is.

He starts talking, and decides that John doesn’t need to know about Sebastian Moran.


	3. Chapter 3

_20 months earlier_

When Sherlock gets the phone call requesting his presence at the south London headquarters of MFG Financial he is not surprised, but is instead filled with utter loathing. He’d been expecting this meeting for some time, foolishly holding out hope his delay tactics would work. If he weren’t so wrapped up in subterfuge he could have made more headway in establishing some sort of leverage, he reflects, but that would have brought its own set of problems.

John had left for the surgery that morning before Sherlock was even fully conscious, was still slightly chilled from his night spent on the outskirts of London chasing down a glass repair van. John fed Andrew, changed him, and put him down on the bed next to Sherlock, where they’d both slept until almost noon, waking only when John texted Sherlock to go and pick up more nappies.

It’s only been six weeks since Andrew had his second surgery, and about four days since John stopped looking like he’d been the one to go under the scalpel. The complications of congenital cataracts in their infant son were not something either of them had expected to manage on top of a self-run business, Andrew’s normal development, and their typical brand of day-to-day theatrics; Sherlock has told himself for weeks now that he’s been handling the MFG issue fine on his own, and John’s involvement would have been nothing but poor management of an increasingly limited resource.

Andrew is safely in Mrs. Hudson’s care now, and the view of the Thames is stretching out in front of Sherlock, the glass lift at MFG taking him to the fifty-seventh floor. Sherlock irrationally, impossibly, wishes he had told John to come.

Ronald Adair welcomes him cheerily when his aide directs Sherlock into the main office. Sherlock knows everything about this man, but it’s all useless information, reductive and unsuitable for predictive estimations. Adair offers him a drink, and a seat, neither of which Sherlock accepts.

Adair is calm, and composed, and entirely sane, and more to the point entirely unscrupulous. “I knew you’d put it together eventually,” he tells Sherlock, pouring himself a snifter of brandy, “but as events on my end have progressed rather more quickly than I’d anticipated, I can’t afford to put this off any further.” He smiles congenially. “There’s really no other choice.”

“What exactly do you want from me?” Sherlock asks, already tired of this man and his posturing, his pretension. They’ve spent the last five minutes rehashing what they both already know about Adair’s involvement in the business dealings of deceased terrorist James Moriarty, and Sherlock loathes few things as much as repeating himself.

Adair is looking out his huge windows at the city skyline, and takes a sip of his drink before he answers. “I want you dead or gone -- it really makes no difference to me which.”

“You expect you can bully me into leaving you alone?”

“I expect you to do what it takes to protect your family.” Adair turns, gestures to the file folder on his desk.

Sherlock takes the three steps over and opens the file; despite knowing what to expect the pictures make him clench his free hand, make him stare at Adair in murderous fury. “You’d hurt an innocent child?”

Adair opens his eyes wide in mock concern. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I wouldn’t hurt anyone. I do, however, know some of the statistics for post-operative complications in infants -- delayed reactions to general anesthetic, for example. It would be tragic if something were to happen, just _heartbreaking_.”

Sherlock decides then and there he’ll kill Ronald Adair if it’s the last thing he does. “What guarantee do I have that you’ll leave them alone if I go?”

“Well the alternative is mutually assured destruction, isn’t it?” Adair asks, like this is a casual, academic conversation. “It’s certainly a given that if any of what must be a mountain of evidence you’ve accumulated were to reach official ears, the deal would be off.”

There are dozens of pages -- Andrew’s birth records, his physicals, John’s rehab progress notes. CCTV camera shots of John and Andrew at the shops, the park. “I can take them with me,” he suggests, though it’s an irredeemably stupid thing to say. Adair is nothing like his former business associate -- he enjoys playing inside the rules, isn’t prone to wild swings in mood or changes to his carefully devised plans. If Moriarty were still alive this partnership would have fallen apart on its own, and had Sherlock been aware of the extend of Adair’s involvement back then he would have put all his effort towards engineering just such a scenario, set them against each other like rabid dogs.

“Then what would I have to hold over your head?” Adair shakes his head shortly, as though he has enough of a soul to be regretful, and steps over to look at the photos from the other side of the desk, tapping them with one finger. “He’s a cute kid, looks just like his dad.” He doesn’t clarify to whom he’s referring. “I’d genuinely hate to see either of them get involved in something... messy.”

Three seconds later Sherlock finds himself holding Adair to the wall, his hands on the craven little mongrel’s throat. “If anything happens to either of them--”

“It’ll have nothing to do with me,” Adair wheezes out, still infuriatingly calm. “Provided you keep to your end of the deal.”

Sherlock squeezes tighter for a long moment, gratified when Adair finally starts looking worried. He clenches hard and then lets go, flings himself away before he commits fully justified murder.

“I’ll give you twenty-four hours to think it over,” Adair tells him, gasping the words at Sherlock’s back as he slams out the door.

He returns home with the nappies, and when John asks him what's wrong, says only that the trail has gone cold on the case.

That night Sherlock selfishly gets John to fuck him. He eggs him on, goads him until John is bullying Sherlock around, shoving in with only a minimum of care, just the way he wants it. Sherlock's brain whites out when he comes, and he thrusts back until spaghetti arms can't hold him up any more. They fall asleep in a sticky, messy heap.

Sherlock wakes up early and stands in his son's room for at least thirty minutes, watching Andrew's chest rise and fall, only ten months old but already a person, someone with likes and dislikes, a temperament, a personality. He’s already using words, babbles at his parents at the same unnecessarily loud volume he’s been using since he was born. Sherlock hadn't expected that, not yet.

Eventually John putters into the room and smiles at Sherlock as though Sherlock has done him some great favor. Sherlock has never hated himself more. He lets John kiss him good morning, tells John he's going to see Lestrade, to meet him at the Met after Andrew wakes up, and then leaves knowing he’s not coming back.

It takes two hours for Sherlock to get to Ascot. He goes to his mother because she already knows anyway, and this isn't going to work otherwise; she gives him a plane ticket to Laos and almost twenty thousand pounds in various currencies, and then slaps him sharply, as though she can't help herself.

"Don't do to him what your father did to me,” she tells him, and gives him a photo, a picture of Sherlock, John and Andrew in her garden; Sherlock is smirking, Andrew looks cranky, and John is almost embarrassingly proud. "You know how quickly visual memories decay,” she reminds him. Sherlock leaves before he can change his mind. At the same time in London Lestrade is calling John, to sadly inform him of Sherlock's death.

**

Traveling ( _running leaving lying_ ) in this way brings back a host of dark memories Sherlock would have rather kept buried.

He’s well aware his emotions are bubbling right under the surface -- guilt sends his hands to shaking, fear has him constantly looking over his shoulder for the first twenty eight hours after he’s fled London. The last time he’d traveled in this sort of capacity he’d been young, foolish, more interested in getting to the next town, the next high. He’d been useless, not worth even the breath it took to call his name; now he has a man’s experience, running for a far darker reason, and yet he still feels like that wastrel, as if the intervening years hadn’t occurred at all.

There are eyes watching him from the moment he leaves his life behind, and those wasted years spent running about the continent ultimately becomes what save him, time and again -- knowing how to take the train through France into Germany, then doubling back and catching a flight into Northern Spain. Knowing streets and shops and the underground, knowing how to get what he needs, knowing, even after all this time, whom to talk to.

He changes names half a dozen times, has a bag with a secret compartment filled with passports, bank cards, and mobile phones all registered to different names and different security numbers and different nationalities. He’s French, and then he’s German -- he’s Czech, and for a time Greek. He teaches himself Castilian Spanish, and takes up smoking again with a vengeance, and eats only when there are dark spots in his eyes, sleeps only when his mind begins to fail him from fatigue. The game is afoot, and there’s a learning curve.

He loses track of himself, two months in.

This week he’s Gérard Charbineau, a traveling Frenchman staying in a hotel in Málaga, to the east of Nerja. Outside it’s hot, sticky; his room is nothing more than a carved out hole in the side of a mountain. His clothes smell of the sea, of the fried food from the tapa bars bordering the coast, of the beer he’d drunk at _La Piqueta_ where a few of Ronald Adair’s employees were enjoying an after-work cocktail and light dinner.

When he returns to his room Sebastian Moran is sitting on his bed, a shotgun across his knees.

“If it isn’t the world’s only consulting detective!”

Sherlock’s stiffens, and his right hand instantly clenches into a fist, heart kicking up a beat so fast he feels momentarily light-headed. “Moran.”

“Aw, come on, is that any way to greet an old friend?” Moran sounds as jovial as ever, but tired too, worn down. He’s playacting at nonchalance, and would never give that kind of weakness away unless he wanted it to be noticed, which means--

“I’m not interested.” The hotel room is just hot enough to be uncomfortable, no matter how light the button-down Sherlock’s wearing is, or the tan trousers. He looks to the bedside table where his gun is and considers his options.

“Of course you are -- or you will be, once you hear what I have on offer.” Moran’s steps are silent on the cheap carpeting, and he walks around the bed to sit at the table next to the room’s only window. “I have to say, you look like right hell.”

Sherlock doesn’t bother acknowledging the comment, too busy examining the evidence. “What makes you so sure I’d participate in whatever kamikaze scheme you have planned?”

Moran’s smile is somehow more vicious and shark-like than it’d been in New York. “How is our dear Johnny-boy these days? I’ve loved seeing him play mummy, it’s really quite darling. Knew you’d have him barefoot in the kitchen in no time, you can always tell the ones who are just dying to bend over and--”

Sherlock interrupts him, and is quite certain he sounds deranged when he does it. “There’s a significant chance I’m going to kill you if you keep down that line of conversation, so I suggest you get to the point.”

Moran doesn’t look put out in the slightest. “You want Adair dead. I want Adair dead. What say we make that happen?”

Sherlock stares at him. “You do realize if there’s anyone I want dead more than him it’s you,” he says flatly. After all, Adair had only threatened John; Moran has actually hurt him.

“You know what they say about dinner before dessert,” Moran answers, obviously pleased with the direction this discussion is heading. “And besides, at this point you don’t really have a choice.”

Sherlock realizes his initial assessment underestimated just how committed Moran is to his plan’s success. “That suggests you think I’d let you leave this room alive.”

An enormous laugh explodes out of Moran, loud and completely out of control. It takes him a long time to get himself together, to sit up and wipe the tears of mirth from his eyes. “You’re a fucking riot, you know that? The both of you. Oh, I am so bloody chuffed I get to spend some time around you, you’ve no idea.” He leans back in his seat and sighs, still chuckling. “You know, John and I had some great times too, back in New York. I had this enormous, oh, what are they called -- the billy clubs, you know? Used it to smash every bone in his foot, but the funny part is--”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Sherlock says. He’s got his gun pointed at Moran, and he doesn’t know when it happened, just that it feels right, feels like the only kind of interaction he _should_ be having with Sebastian Moran.

“Hey, hey, it’s all fine,” Moran says, holding his hands up in mock surrender. He’s clearly not worried in the slightest, and Sherlock hates him just that little bit more. “Let’s not make things worse for ourselves, alright? I mean, you kill me -- or, well, I die at all, actually -- and proof of your continuing existence gets sent straight to one Ronald Adair, and that’d be the end of it, huh?”

Sherlock absorbs this information. It still takes him an unbelievably long time to put down the gun.

Moran nods at Sherlock like Sherlock needs his fucking approval. “I’ve been keeping tabs on Johnny, you know -- for someone so completely useless it’s strangely fascinating to watch him play mister mum.” He smiles like a magnanimous king. “I can fill you in if you like, let you know how he’s doing. Even little Junior, though maybe ‘little’ Is the wrong word because holy shit but he’s a tubby fucker--”

Sherlock lunges, manages to topple Moran over with his chair, manages to get in a few good hits before the ex-soldier has him flat on his back, a forearm pressed against Sherlock’s throat.

“Not bad for a pansy,” Moran says, grinning. Blood from his split lip drips onto Sherlock’s face. “But not good enough. You’re a clever man; think it through, Detective.”

“Get off me,” Sherlock snarls, no matter how painful it is. Both his hands are clenched in useless fists down by his side. Moran releases him easily, moves to right the chair and sit in it again. Sherlock presses his back up against the bed. “Give me what you have,” he says, and feels something inside him break loose.

**

Sherlock spends the next sixteen months getting stabbed, broken, bled, bruised, and left for dead.

Moran is a psychopath, but a _smart_ psychopath, and to Sherlock’s dismay he comes to be one of the most important cogs in the machine of Sherlock’s continued existence. The man hadn’t been lying when he told Sherlock that he kept constant contact with his handler, and therefore Adair -- while there was no love lost between them, Sherlock is under no illusion that events would unfold just as Moran had predicted. Moran’s death would set off a chain reaction that would mean the ultimate sacrifice of Sherlock’s family, and there is simply no way that will happen, _ever_ , not while he is still alive to prevent it.

He is pared down to the essentials -- hands with which to work, eyes with which to see. There is nothing but the chase, the constant movement of his body and mind towards one single goal. It’s easier than he thought it would be, to unshoulder the parts of himself that he simply has no use for -- he steals and cheats, manipulates and lies without any trace of remorse. The degree to which he is willing to go scares him in those rare, quiet moments when he can bother caring about his ethical code.

He hadn’t anticipated the long, endless stretches of mind-numbing boredom, peppered with moments of chaos and terror. Moran is an unknown element, and there is a true degree of insanity in his behavior that sets Sherlock on edge. The man operates in such a way that reminds Sherlock of John, on those occasions when John did what he had to do to get things done, for good or for ill. John had no problem fighting, hurting, _killing_ , but he’d always been led by a strong moral compass, knowing with certainty what was right and what was wrong.

Moran has no such compass.

“--nsane!” Sherlock roars, his voice drowned out by the _boom_ of mortar and glass, the crumbling scream of a building collapsing in flames. The warehouse is eclipsed in red against the night sky, a wall of fire reflected in the river beneath. The building pops and groans and falls apart in inches, flames licking the sky thirty feet upwards.

Moran laughs in his face, covered in blood that is at least partially his -- when he smiles, his teeth are coated red. “Worked though, didn’t it?” he says, snatching up a bag he’d stashed behind a skip and jogging in the direction opposite the burning building. Sirens blare in the distance, and the building groans, the roar of collapsing floors within loud enough that Sherlock can feel it under his boots. “You should have seen the look on their faces, would have made you smile for once. They never saw it coming.”

He grabs onto Sherlock’s sleeve and ducks them into the darkened entrance of a street shop, snarls, “Oi!” when Sherlock grabs him by the lapels and slams him up against the wall once, twice.

“You’re going to get them killed!” he roars, shaking with anger, even as his head snaps back from the left hook Moran delivers him. When he refocuses, dazed and staggering, the man is pulling him back out onto the street, _yanking_ him towards the car they’d left parked around the corner.

His unexpected, _unwanted_ alliance with Moran begins to deteriorate the fragile hold Sherlock has on an indefinable part of himself. He eats next to nothing; he sleep less than that. His vision tunnels at inopportune times, and there is a month where sharp pains in his chest nearly get him killed. He runs through the twenty thousand pounds, and is forced to ask his mother to send him more.

His mother also occasionally sends scraps of information on his family, tiny specs of useless information Sherlock covets, obsesses over, and is always, always petrified to read. Adair could change his mind; it's incredible Moran _hasn't_ changed his mind yet, just to watch Sherlock's face when he shares the news, and Sherlock waits in the most detestable fear he has ever known for the day he learns it's all been for naught. Those days he feels like a coward, and a failure, and nothing like the man he used to be.

It’s made worse by the way he obsesses over his son -- what Andrew's doing, wearing, saying, eating, thinking, playing, touching, smelling, feeling, learning, hearing, seeing. After a year he realizes he doesn't even know what his son looks like anymore, and adds the possibilities to his unending contemplation.

He thinks about John only three times. The first time is when his mother sends an encrypted message telling him John's moved in with Mycroft. Sherlock responds by drugging himself into a light coma for thirty-six hours, at the end of which he’s no longer ready to catch the next flight back to London. Why would he leave, Sherlock thinks frantically as the drugs drag him under. Mrs. Hudson would give him a break on the rent, Andrew is as much her grandchild as Sherlock's mother's, John could stay there, he would be _fine_ there, _Mycroft_ obviously didn't think he was fine--

The chemical sucker punch of unconsciousness is nothing but a relief.

The second time is fifteen months into his exile, in a pub in the south of France, where he's waiting for a mark who is obviously not going to show. Sherlock is so tired he can't physically pick himself up to leave, and he makes a great target, he knows, and it's a miracle he's not dead already.

A woman sits next to him, and looks down at the ratty photo he's been staring at endlessly. "Who are they?" she asks in soft, genteel Parisian French. Half a look tells him she’s not a threat, not doing it on a dare, or even trying to be nosy; she's hiding too, from a lackluster past and a terrible marriage, he sees. Seeking out some camaraderie.

"My family,” he says.

"They look just alike." She smiles gently, afraid to offend him by appearing patronizing. He goes back to ignoring her, and eventually she leaves him alone. He stays in the pub until they kick him out.

The third time he thinks of John, Sherlock kills a man in cold blood in the alley of a bar in Nýrsko. By the time he’s cleaned his knife he’s put it out of his mind.

**

The day they kill Adair, Sherlock genuinely wonders about the state of his sanity, because he feels no different at all. Sixteen months of work to get to this point, to keep Moran and his manic, psychotic tendencies in check, and there is nothing. Whatever capacity he had seems burned out of him, destroyed from an unsustainable degree of overuse.

They catch up to Adair in South Africa, where he has been indulging in his favorite addiction at an expensive club under the guise of social superiority. Sherlock can’t get close enough, not fast enough to take the man down -- he doesn’t have that kind of training, even after more than a year keeping up with Moran. He is relegated to watching the exchange in a security room, blood dripping into his eyes, three guards unconscious on the floor around him.

He’s not as good as Moran, but he is getting better.

Adair and Moran despise one another -- of course they do, they’re polar opposites -- but Sherlock was unaware of the degree of their animosity. Watching Adair’s face when Moran walks into the private suite is an unpleasant revelation.

“Well, this is unexpected,” Adair says, his voice dripping with disdain. “I’d have thought you’d find a way to fulfill that death wish by now.”

“You know me, Ronnie baby,” Moran replies, cheerful and manic.

"To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?" Adair asks, sighing in theatrical exhaustion. He turns away, dismissive in every cell of his body, and makes himself a drink. Sherlock contemplates how little the man’s playbook has changed in the intervening years, and how stupid someone so intelligent can be.

"You owe it to a mutual friend of ours,” Moran says, pulling out a knife half the length of his arm. "Though really, you should thank yourself first -- if you'd just given me my share it wouldn't have had to come to this."

"What are you--" Adair freezes as he turns back and realizes the true nature of the situation. "How did you get that in here?"

"Is that really what you want to know right now?" Moran asks, advancing, knife hand down by his side. One of the guards in the room starts to groan, forcing Sherlock to turn and hit him hard enough to keep him down. When he looks back Moran has Adair against the wall and the knife dangerously close to Adair's eye. There is a flicker inside Sherlock's chest, a dark sensation that says _Good._

"Security's already on their way here," Adair was saying, trying -- and failing -- to sound in control. "You'll be dead before you can spend all that money you don't deserve."

"I earned that," Moran says, snarls. "Earned it fair and square--"

"You couldn't recognize fair if it was spelled out for you,” Adair snaps, sucking in a sharp breath as Moran presses the knife closer. "You're a blockheaded gun for hire; we both know Moriarty’s death left you with nothing, and if you kill me you'll have less than that."

Sherlock half expects the taunting insult to set Moran off, but it doesn’t, of course it doesn’t. Moran is the consummate professional, after all.

“Are you afraid?” Moran only asks, dark and pleased. He tilts his head, reptilian, licking the corner of his lips. “I think this is you, begging through your fear. But what’s getting in the way, Ronnie?” He drags the knife down Adair’s face, the tip digging in enough that a line of blood wells, from eyelid to chin, a long, crimson tear. “Pride? Arrogance?”

Adair is breathing fast, chest rising and falling, words sharp on the tail-end of each exhalation. “When security gets here—”

“They won’t be coming,” Moran says firmly, watching with fascination as the tip of his knife burrows deeper and deeper into Adair’s jaw. He grins, and Sherlock doesn’t have to see it to know his pupils are blown wide with the thrill of his hunt, the pleasure of his encroaching kill. “Why don’t you wave hello to my friend in the camera? He’s been waiting for this for ever-so-long.”

"What are you talking about?" Adair says, starting to struggle. "Who'd be insane enough to help you?"

"Do you remember my last job?" Moran asks back. The curved edge of his blade disappears beneath Adair's jaw; Sherlock can't see exactly what happens to it, but from the sound Adair makes Sherlock can guess Moran has dug it in. "My favorite job?"

"Stal- stalking that shirt-lifter with the -- the --" Adair's face turns stunned, disbelieving, horrified, and then _angry._ Sherlock can admit the man is strikingly composed with a knife-wielding psychopath in his face, but that’s not difficult when you are yourself a sociopath. "He's still--"

"Very much alive, yes,” Moran says. "For now, anyway." He winks up at the camera; Sherlock feels nothing even close to fear.

"He know the psycho shit you used to pull watching his husband and kid? The number of times I had to send someone after you, the reason I pulled you off the assignment altogether?"

It’s like watching a cat toy with a mouse. Moran smiles, gleeful, a kid at Christmas. “Oh, this is my favorite bit,” he says, and Sherlock watches with fascination as Adair’s blood begins to trickle down the knife, slow and dark against the silver blade. “I tortured him, Ronnie. Both of them. One of the best days of my life, to be honest.”

He presses the knife in that much closer. “You’ve been pushing good men to rotten ends for a long time. Jim never did that – Jim just took what was already there and shined it up a bit. He always appreciated my skills. I don’t like your type of business. I don’t like you.”

Adair is afraid now, Sherlock can tell, as if he’s only just now realized the danger he’s in. “Please,” Adair says. “Anything. Money, cars, women, whatever you want.”

“I already have everything I want,” Moran replies, cheerful. “Say goodbye now, Ronnie dear.”

"He'll kill them too,” Adair says loudly. It takes Sherlock a second to realize Adair is talking to him. "He wanted to take your son, thought it'd be a laugh, I can help y--"

Moran pounces; pulls the knife away and twists, throwing Adair on the ground, a hand on his throat. Adair starts to struggle, Moran starts to laugh. Sherlock can't look away.

The cat gets the mouse, and though the video is grainy and unfocused, Sherlock can see, with remarkable clarity, the patterns Adair’s blood makes as Moran slits his throat.

He watches, because Adair put him on this path two years ago when he threatened Sherlock, threatened his _son_. He watches and feels nothing; Moran plunges his knife into Adair’s face over and over and over, until all that’s left of the man’s features is pulpy viscera, indistinguishable flesh.

Moran stands, scrapes his knife clean along the thigh of his jeans, and fills the camera’s view screen with his face. “It’s been fun, Sherlock Holmes,” he says with an ironic little salute. Sherlock hurls himself out of the security room and traces the man’s steps to the exit but it’s too late. Moran completely disappears.

**

It doesn’t take Sherlock long to track Moran – perhaps it would have, once, but this is his life now, the sum total of his experience, his skills. There isn’t anything else he _could_ do. Making his way to a little town on the northern border of the Czech Republic is more work than finding Moran once he gets there, the man’s reputation preceding him even here, where people believe in keeping their mouths shut.

Whatever they say to each other, whatever precedes the violence, Sherlock doesn’t actually remember. It’s a giant blank space, a dark pit that wakes him up every single night for weeks after, shaking and sweating and snarling the most foul curses he can think of. He has no idea what happened, or how he wound up in a hospital outside of Prague. He knows Moran is dead because the papers report a body found, and from the description it can be no one else, but the details are lacking. The report describes it as a vicious and brutal killing; Sherlock finds he really doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter, not when he is here and Moran is not and it means Sherlock can go _home_.

He checks himself out within twelve hours of hearing the news and the same day catches a flight back to London, his bruised and torn skin making all the other travelers nervous. He spends the trip wondering if John will hate him, if John will leave him, if John's left already, moved on, started seeing Sara or some other woman, or maybe another man (the thought makes Sherlock grip his seat's armrest; not another man, just no other men). There's too much to think about, eighteen months of things, and Sherlock spends most of the trip twitching uncomfortably in his seat under the onslaught.

What he doesn't expect (and really it is foolish that he hadn’t) is for Mycroft's car to meet him at the airport.

**

Mycroft is sitting in the car, staring at Sherlock in undisguised fascination. Sherlock feels twitchy, paranoid, and so bloody angry it could rip him apart. "Why your house?" Sherlock asks, and it's more an accusation than a question.

"Because they were tired of being alone,” Mycroft snaps. The anger abruptly washes away as Sherlock twists his own fingers brutally, even the one that's sprained, and watches the London traffic.

"You look terrible,” Mycroft tells him unnecessarily. Sherlock nods absently and continues staring out the window. "Next time _come to me first._ "

"You couldn't have helped," Sherlock tells him, matter-of-fact, distant even, as they drive through a tunnel. "You couldn't even _find_ me."

They don't say anything else on the drive to Downing Street. Sherlock thinks he should be saying something caustic about Mycroft’s political ambitions, his transparent control issues on lurid, lewd display. Instead he says nothing at all. It's obvious John isn't home, and Mycroft leads Sherlock through the house, upstairs to the playroom where Mahdavi is reading a story to Andrew. Her eyes widen when she sees him, go wet, and she closes the book, tells Andrew they can finish later. She follows Mycroft out the door, shuts it behind her. Sherlock sits on the floor, his legs pretzeled, and stares at his son.

Andrew looks back curiously, eyebrows crinkled behind his glasses, entirely unafraid. He's already stretched out some, tall for a two year old, no longer this tiny, round thing. He looks like Sherlock, he looks like _John_ , especially with the glasses, and his eyes are John’s, a dark, dark blue. "Hello," Sherlock says, clears his throat and restarts when he hears his own voice, croaky and unrecognizable. "Do you remember me?"

Andrew stares at him; Sherlock tries again. "Do you know who I am?" Andrew nods, then smiles proudly because he knows the answer to this and expects to be lauded for it. "Papa!”

Sherlock smiles back even though all the bruises on his face protest. "That's right." He reaches out, unsure of how to do this, he was never good at this anyway, always had John to tell him what was normal -- "May I?" Andrew steps close enough that Sherlock can reel him in, can hold him against his chest and smell his baby soft hair and completely, silently, fall apart.

He doesn't know how long it is before Andrew gets fidgety, pushes against Sherlock’s chest and orders him to go and play. Sherlock nods and picks Andrew up, takes them out of the room and down the stairs. They're on their way outside when John walks through the front door.

Sherlock freezes; so does John.

Sherlock greedily takes in every single facet of John's appearance, his existence, and almost staggers under the weight of it, of John chronically sleep deprived, chronically underweight, hunched in on himself even as he stands painfully straight, a man upright only because he has no idea what else _to_ do. "John,” Sherlock says, his mind completely out of his own control. John is here instead of at Baker Street, where he belongs, where their lives are _safe_ and _good_ and John smiled and called Sherlock an idiot.

John still isn't saying anything, isn't smiling, is staring at Sherlock like he's an impossibility. "It's alright, John,” Sherlock says. "You're not making this up." John just looks at him like he's speaking an alien language. He looks the same and somehow completely unlike himself, and Sherlock can't stomach the number of things that must have happened, or changed, or ceased to exist at the same time Sherlock did.

That's how these things work, he's pretty sure, and he's a fool for thinking otherwise, but if he spent the last two years exiled from everything that's ever mattered just to walk away empty-handed he really won't manage whatever happens next.

John looks away from him.


	4. Chapter 4

_Present_

He doesn’t look at John, not once the entire time, because he doesn’t need the visual -- John looking at him the way he has the past month has been challenging enough. The sun is fully up now, scant minutes left before they have to get up and take Andrew to school. “At some point I stopped thinking I’d come home, I don’t know when. I wouldn’t have been so reckless, otherwise.” He quirks his mouth, a smile that feels more self-deprecating than it probably looks. “I certainly wasn’t expecting Adair to fall so completely for such a simple trap.”

He pulls in a short, but deep breath. “So tell me, John, how much of this damage cannot be undone.”

John looks thoughtful for a second, his eyes neon in the early morning light. He asks calmly, “This man you killed, what did he look like?”

Sherlock frowns at the non-sequiter. “Six-two, fourteen stone five, brown hair, brown eyes, tanned, originally from southern Spain, most likely somewhere near Gibraltar.”

“And... you said he was an abuser.”

“Yes.”

“What branch of the military was he in?”

“Navy -- officer, made it to Lieutenant before being dishonorably discharged.”

John gives him a long, infinitely sad look. “Sherlock what, exactly, about that man reminded you of me?”

Sherlock opens his mouth to answer and finds that, shockingly, he has nothing to say. “I... I don’t know.” He doesn’t understand why his voice sounds the way it does, nothing like the way it should. “I had a reason. A good reason.”

“I’m sure you did, at the time,” John agrees. Sherlock frowns at him, but until he can figure it out for himself he has nothing with which to argue the point.

“Sherlock,” John says, sitting up on one elbow as though he’s just realized something. “How many other people did you kill?” He’s looking down at Sherlock like this is the most important question he could ever answer.

“Directly or indirectly?”

John blinks at him, tilts his head in astonishment. “What do you... Jesus Christ.” He takes a deep breath. “Directly, Sherlock.”

“One,” Sherlock answers. He sits up sharply, pulling John with him, holding John’s wrist down by their sides. “What are you saying?” His voice needs to stop sounding like that, right now, right this _instant._

“You’re not seeing this the way it was,” John says. He lifts both his hands to Sherlock’s face, taking Sherlock’s hand, still desperately -- desperately? -- hanging on with him. “Bloody hell, you made it sound like you went on some kind of massacre, slaughtering babies, raping and pillaging.”

“ _I did awful things_ ,” Sherlock snarls. There’s no reason to sugarcoat it, and John’s intentional ignorance is making this impossibly frustrating. Sherlock’s shaking with -- with _rage_ , absolute fury, suddenly livid with John for trying to turn a blind eye. “Why are you trying to downplay this?”

“I’m not,” John says, wholly serious. Sherlock’s other hand has come up to grip John’s free wrist, not pulling, not pushing, just holding. “But Sherlock, you’re still _you_. Under all that strain, and stress, and bloody awful trauma, you’re still in there somewhere.”

“How the fuck can you know that? _How?_ There’s -- you can’t -- you’re talking utter, _sodding_ rubbish--”

He’s missing things, his brain is skipping over information, _important_ information, because John’s moved them, Sherlock’s leaning against John’s shoulder, gasping air like his life depends on it, and he has no idea when it happened. “It’s okay,” John says, breathes the words near Sherlock’s ear. “It’ll be okay, Sherlock.”

“You don’t know that,” Sherlock mumbles into John’s shoulder. He barely sounds coherent. “You can’t know that.”

“I know a lot of things,” John says.

Sherlock has never wanted to hear the words so badly. “Not this.”

“I know you,” John says.

Sherlock finds he has nothing to say to that, not for a long while. “That’s true,” he finally murmurs, voice pitched low, like he’s giving away some kind of secret.

There’s a knock on the door, and Andrew’s voice, ordering them to _Wake up, it’s time for school._

“You’ve turned him into a deplorably early riser,” Sherlock mutters against John’s skin.

“Well you made him impossibly stubborn, so we’re even,” John says, as Andrew knocks again.

“Gotta go to school, Papa!” Andrew yells through the door in French.

Sherlock pulls back from John so he can glare at the door. “How does he know it’s my fault we’re not up yet?”

John snorts. “He’s brilliant.” Sherlock makes to stand up but John pulls him back down onto the bed, close to kiss him. “Sherlock, we’ll get through this.” Sherlock concentrates on the feeling of John’s hand on the side of his face. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” Sherlock says, nodding jerkily, his eyes roaming anywhere but on John’s face. “That’s... good.” It’s the best he can do; something about John’s touch makes him think that perhaps it will be enough.

**

Two months later it’s an exceptionally warm day.

John’s lived in London long enough to know that it’ll be one of the last they’ll have for the year. The leaves have already started turning brown, and the sun doesn’t warm the ground quite like it had in the summer, and there’s rain in the forecast for the end of the week, but for now they only need a light jacket, the air still warm enough for outdoor games and long, leisurely walks.

Mrs. Hudson always keeps a stale loaf of bread for them to feed the ducks at Hyde Park, and so quite without planning it John goes and fetches it from her, and wraps Andrew up in last season’s jacket already too short for him in the arms, and off they go, all three of them, he and Sherlock walking with their baby between them.

Andrew, always overjoyed at the opportunity to go to the park, is doubly so with the still-rare treat of getting to do so with his papa. He’s got over his initial mistrust, and while he still favors John, he can be left alone with Sherlock for longer and longer periods of time without having a meltdown. He’s been holding Sherlock’s hand for fifteen minutes, chubby fingers grasped so delicately between Sherlock’s longer, thinner ones, and when he says, “Up, up Papa!” Sherlock swings him high into his arms just to hear him laugh.

It feels normal, something normal families do – there are couples with their children, and families picnicking in this last, desperate grasp of summer.

They feed the ducks and swans that are making Hyde Park their temporary home before they fly south for warmer weather. John takes pictures with his phone: Andrew laughing and shrieking with joy when the ducks swarm them to get a little nibble, Sherlock hoisting him up to sit on his shoulders so he can throw the bread even further. God save him, John can’t help but brush the crumbs out from Sherlock’s thick, short hair, can’t help but smile and tickle Andrew’s legs until he cries with laughter.

Eventually they make their way to the toddler park, for once nearly empty of children.

“Let him play,” John says gently, when Sherlock swings him down from his shoulders and looks as if he’d like to join him. “We don’t want to cramp his style.”

“He’s three,” Sherlock replies absently. His eyes haven’t budged from Andrew, who once he’d seen the park had forgotten entirely about his parents. John watches him climb up his favorite ladder, bottom wriggling as he squirms up onto the landing. He’ll never understand how the child can be so entertained climbing up and down that same ladder a hundred times.

He leads Sherlock to a bench right in front of Andrew’s ladder, John’s regular spot, and where he’s spent countless hours. Sherlock sits without actually blinking, staring at their son like a starving man.

“Mia is the same way,” John says after a little while. “It’s got to come from my side of the family.”

“Hmm?”

“Harry and Clara’s daughter.” _My daughter_ , he doesn’t say, because she isn’t, not really. “She was born on Christmas day. She loves, _loves_ ladders – I sent her a baby slide for her first birthday and Harry said she’s been like a little monkey ever since.”

Sherlock looks at him, startled, as if he’d forgotten entirely about what they’d done, the gift John had given his sister. Maybe he had. John watches Andrew help a little boy, Patty’s son Keith, climb up too. “The first time I nearly had a heart attack. He was barely eighteen months old, but he wouldn’t stop crying until I let him climb that bloody ladder. I spent hours here, helping him down the slide, making sure he didn’t fall off. He hates the slide, by the way, but he’s long since figured out it’s the only way he can go back up the ladder.”

Sherlock is staring at him as if he’s speaking another language, as if he’s only now just realizing that Andrew and John have a history here, that this wasn’t a one-off but a weekly occurrence. “And it’s safe?”

“Of course. Have to let the children fall once in a while, it’s healthy, but yes. This park is specially made for little ones.”

Sherlock turns back to stare at Andrew, who has gone down the tube slide and emerged, triumphant, at the bottom. He hasn’t gone head first in ages. “Not so little now.”

“Never very little,” John corrects, smiling when Andrew waves at them so hard he almost tips over. “He’s going to be enormous, at least as tall as your brother, if not taller.”

“All the men in my family are tall,” Sherlock replies absently.

It feels as if they’re talking, yet not talking at all. It’s so bloody _polite_ , like acquaintances having a conversation, like John doesn’t have his ring in his pocket, tucked so carefully in his wallet.

Christ he missed his husband, even though this pain is as fresh as the day Sherlock died. He walks around with so many _questions_ , and without any clear way of asking them. There are still times when Sherlock might as well be a million miles away.

Andrew runs up to them, squealing with laughter, and throws his arms around John. And then, with only a moment’s hesitation, he hugs Sherlock just as tightly, dragging him down to press a wet kiss against his cheek.

Just like that he’s up and gone again, laughing and screaming with glee, and Sherlock is left looking so heartbreakingly shell shocked that John reaches out and grasps his hand, squeezing it tightly. “He loves his papa,” he says quietly. “He always has.”

He watches Sherlock swallow, and swallow.

**  
Sherlock, according to the government, is still very much dead.

It’s a sorry business bringing someone back to life, Mycroft has discovered: at best exasperating, at worst ludicrously difficult. He is, for heaven’s sake, the Deputy Prime Minister, yet even that doesn’t have much clout when faced with the English bureaucracy and its seemingly endless ability to file things in triplicate with dozens upon dozens of offices. Beginning the process is nothing short of what going to war must feel like. He thinks perhaps it has ruined his career.

He sends paperwork over to the Baker Street flat constantly, all of which comes back to him quickly. John is a kind heart, but for heaven’s sake the man can’t forge a signature to save his life. That he has felt the need to speaks to Sherlock’s state of mind, because John is a moral and ethical man, except in those rare moments when he isn’t, all for the greater good.

It is how he finds himself sitting across from his brother who, by all rights, looks twenty times better than he did when he’d practically stumbled out of that plane, bruised and beaten and white as a ghost. The split lip has healed, the eye is no longer black, but there is still something fragile about him, something altogether breakable in this face, in the way he holds himself.

Mycroft realizes he can’t quite stomach the sight of it; he comes to his feet as quickly as he can without it appearing anything more than relaxed and confident. Outside the window he can see his nephew running after Thatcher with an enormous green ball. His nose is rosy from the cold. “Thank you for coming,” he says, as if the man sitting in his library isn’t his by blood. “This shouldn’t take long.”

"Obviously, it doesn't take much time for you to tell me what you think I should be doing and for me to then ignore it,” Sherlock answers, eyes on the books in the study, the most interesting thing about Mycroft in his opinion.

Mycroft ignores him pointedly; really, there’s nothing at all to be said in response to his brother’s particular brand of snotty commentary. Instead, he watches his nephew play, little legs pumping as he runs across the autumn leaves blanketing his garden. Thatcher is being so careful not to outrun him, playing with Andrew as if he were a puppy again. “It takes an immeasurable amount of paperwork to bring someone back from the dead,” he tells Sherlock, glancing in the reflection of the window at his brother, who has his legs crossed and his fingers laced calmly together. “As you might imagine, I had to contact several offices and departments to begin the process of bringing you back. I expect you’ll have a new National Insurance number, but you’ll have to go in person to get your birth certificate renewed -- they’ll need your fingerprints.”

"What is it?" Sherlock asks blandly, his eyes still roaming the room.

Mycroft frowns. "What is what?"

"What is it you want?" Sherlock clarifies. His attention returns to Mycroft, scans him head to toe with narrowed eyes. "You could have sent me a text with this kind of dull information, so what is it? You want your gratitude to have that special, in-person touch?" His expression is mockingly grateful. "Thank you, Mycroft, this is all very... _involved_ of you."

That his brother is trying to sound like his old self is painfully obvious -- that’s he’s failing, equally so. Mycroft turns from the window to look at him. “You’ve fallen out of the habit of arguing with me, brother-mine,” he replies, reading the tension in Sherlock’s hands, the tap of his foot. “What is it that you expected when I asked you to come?”

"The usual brand of pedantic nonsense, which I must admit you've delivered on admirably. Unsurprising, but impressive nonetheless." Sherlock finally gives into his fidgeting, stands abruptly and deliberately stalks past the window Mycroft's standing at to look out the _other_ window and watch his son play. "We had plans, you know. You could get to the point."

“I’ve been to the flat three times since your return. Each time, John told me you were unavailable. You and I both know John is simply incapable of lying with any sort of believability, or else your _farce_ wouldn’t have been necessary.”

He’s beginning to give in to the anger, and it makes him distinctly uncomfortable. He shifts away from the window, turning his back to his brother until the sight of his books – rows and rows of knowledge, cold and unemotional and unshakable – bring him back into a semblance of control. He feels dangerously close to a precipice that he doesn’t want to explore, not now. “I wanted to see my nephew, and my brother.”

"You'd think with your many CCTV cameras tracking us down would be an easy task,” Sherlock says. He crosses his arms and watches as Andrew tumbles over the ball, and tries to steady himself enough to go after it. Mycroft is still utterly unprepared for the looks that cross his brother's face while watching Andrew, speaking to him, interacting with him. Even his impossible standards seem to have been met by his admittedly astonishing son. "We've just been busy; surely you don’t need me to explain why."

He doesn’t; John’s reaction would forever live in Mycroft’s memory, a point of reference for all things to come after it. Mycroft tries not to think about it, at the way pain could make a face so cared for twist and decay before his very eyes. He hopes he never has to see that expression on John’s face, or watch his brother brought down to his knees, again.

“Yes, John told me about your trip to A&E,” Mycroft says, with more force than he means to, agitated and uncomfortable with the sensation building in his chest.

He goes again to his desk, pulls a folder free from the uncharacteristic mess. “There’s the matter of removing the headstone at home – Mummy refuses, and so with your leave I’ll take care of the arrangements and have the casket disinterred. I’ve spoken to Detective Inspector Lestrade, and he has agreed to keep from pressing charges if the corpse proves to be one of the two medical-school cadavers that went missing the year of your death. A ‘Dr. Molly Harper’’s signature was on the release form for a corpse that was headed to the St. Bart’s Practicals department and was never received.”

"Simple,” Sherlock agrees, his attention still elsewhere. Mycroft is used to this kind of dismissal, knows the reasons why Sherlock thinks it necessary; usually it doesn't even approach his concern. Today it makes his blood boil. "Are we done here, then?"

"Not in the slightest,” Mycroft snaps, making Sherlock whip his head around in surprise.

Mycroft is distantly aware of his hands, but he is far too busy dealing with the red steadily coating his eyes to worry about how loud the file is trembling in his grip. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me, Sherlock. I’ve convinced the lead Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard not to arrest you for theft of a human cadaver and forgery. How did you get into the DNA system, hmm? Or is that another question I shouldn’t bother you with?

He snaps the file on the desk – the papers within slip out, fall to the floor in a shower of white. “And what about the headstone, the coffin? I suppose the disposal of the corpse doesn’t worry you overly much; after all, why should it bother you that the statute of limitations on the use of a cadaver is two years before the remains are given once more to the family?”

He leans over his desk, gripping the edge of it until he can breathe – he can’t _breathe_ , there isn’t enough air in his library, his sanctuary. His emotions are bouncing off the wall of books like rubber balls. “And what about two years worth of grieving? Or is that simply something else I should take care of, brush away?”

Sherlock has the gall, the _gall_ , to look taken aback. "What are you - you know exactly why I did what I did." He turns to face Mycroft fully, arms crossed. "I had to protect my family."

“And I have to protect mine,” Mycroft shouts, in a tone just short of a roar.

The anger has torn apart his carefully constructed façade; that he is calm, that he is in control, that he is above all else English, and therefore an emotional vault. He is not the Deputy Prime Minister – in this moment he is the angry, frustrated brother of the most damndably infuriating human being on the face of the Earth.

“You should have come to me,” he says, pointing a finger at his brother. “There was a time you could come to me for anything, _would_ come to me for anything. I could have helped you end this before you put this family through the trauma of _burying you_. I watched your partner fall to pieces, you unimaginable cretin, I stood by and could do _nothing_. I—” His throat burns suddenly, hot and tight and painful, like something is clawing at the inside of it. It just makes the anger worse, makes him stalk around the desk, fists clenched. He wants to pound his fist into that shocked face, because his little brother deserves it, deserves a right thrashing after such a stupid, _stupid_ stunt. “You should have come to me,” he says, voice thick with rage. “ _You should have come to me_.”

"You can't fix everything,” Sherlock says, off-kilter in a way only Mycroft, and their mother, and perhaps John, now, would notice. Sherlock sounds like he's trying to convince himself as much as anyone else. "I made the best possible choice out of the available--"

" _You made the wrong choice_ ,” Mycroft interrupts.

Sherlock's face coalesces into fury, their mother's temper finally snapping through his shock. "I don't need this from you, Mycroft -- you or your constant condescension, your ridiculous need to always be right, always be in control. _I didn't need your help_."

Mycroft isn’t aware of what’s happening, only that the anger blinds him for a moment, roaring through his ears. When he’s again aware of himself his younger brother is on the ground, holding a hand to his face – blood gushing from a nearly broken nose and trickling red between his fingers – with the most startled expression Mycroft has ever seen on him.

"You hit me,” Sherlock says behind his hand, the words muffled. Mycroft blinks down at Sherlock, takes in the wonderment in his tone, the way he's stating the most obvious of facts. He feels an instant flash of guilt, and an even stronger one of relief. "You're not allowed to hit me."

"You're not allowed to die,” Mycroft answers, shaking his hand out slightly. He moves across the space between them and holds out his other hand. After a long pause Sherlock takes it, lets Mycroft pull him up.

"I didn't realize,” Sherlock says, then frowns at himself and restarts. "It didn't occur to me that you'd--" He pauses as Mycroft hands him a handkerchief, holding it to his own nose before continuing. "I was always under the impression you thought I'd be dead by thirty."

Mycroft refrains from rolling his eyes, but only because he’s already committed enough indignities for one day. “I never thought you’d be dead by thirty – _you¬_ thought you’d be dead by thirty, a goal which you seemed intent on achieving, and I on delaying.”

It’s like restating the facts, as if Mycroft is rebuilding the world for his little brother – as if Sherlock knows the song, but has forgotten the words. It’s utterly disarming to realize that they have drifted this far apart, that their lives have become so different that one couldn’t see across the abyss to the other. At the same time, he is comforted by the maturity he can see in Sherlock’s face, that despite everything the experience has helped him develop from the overgrown adolescent he was to the adult he has become.

He frowns sharply at Sherlock, angry at himself for having lost his temper, angrier still at Sherlock for bringing him to that point. “I don’t require that you explain your whereabouts these last years.” He doesn’t say that he’s pieced it together already, that he is, even now, tracing Sherlock’s steps to the hole Moran is buried in. Sherlock can’t quite look him in the eye, and that is not Mycroft’s intention at all. He stares at his brother until Sherlock returns his gaze. “I have worked hard to be where I am, and my position affords me eyes and ears I otherwise couldn’t have attained legally. I need you to promise that you will never consider such drastic measures again, not without consulting me first.”

"I can't promise that,” Sherlock says, and for once it's not goading, or mulish independence. Doesn't make it less difficult to swallow. "I don't know all the variables. I can promise it will be a very last resort."

"Not good enough,” Mycroft says, carefully enunciating every word.

"It'll have to be,” Sherlock says, equally calm.

Their staring contest is interrupted by a shriek; they both turn to the window, where Andrew is sat on the grass, one of Mycroft's security staff making a poor attempt to console him. Sherlock immediately turns, strides out of the room without another word and Mycroft, as always, follows, just to keep an eye on things.

They make their way outside, neither bothering to speak. Once Andrew sets his sights on his father he starts crying again, giant crocodile tears while he struggles to his feet, a rip in his trousers at the knee telling the story for him. Sherlock doesn't soothe Andrew the way John does, but he picks him up and holds him protectively, and that seems to be enough. "I'm sorry,” Sherlock says over Andrew's giant sniffles. It takes Mycroft a second to realize it's directed at him. "It was... unavoidable, but I perhaps underestimated the degree to which my absence would be felt. By everyone,” he clarifies.

Mycroft surprises them both -- emotional displays are, after all, not his forte. He squeezes his brother’s shoulder, shakes him gently, and kisses Andrew’s forehead. He is, without a doubt, Sherlock’s child; Andrew graces him with the same watery smile Sherlock used to give him, so long ago when his little brother chased after him, laughing and shouting in their mother’s garden. “John should be off work soon. Why don’t you stay for dinner?”

**

Sherlock's has, somewhat uncharacteristically, been putting off this day for weeks. Months now, in all accuracy - three of them, and another five days besides. He'd been holding out hope (against all experience and reason) that time would dim some of the emotional intensity John's always had a penchant for displaying.

It hasn't.

It's not a good sign that Mycroft has offered up one of his many drivers for the trek out to Ascot, but in this case it's for the best. Andrew is ensconced between Sherlock and John, sat in his booster seat, rambling endlessly to his parents about any and everything that crosses his mind. Despite knowing it's a perfectly typical developmental stage John has taken to calling this 'Sherlock's Legacy', particularly when Andrew's meandering observations delve into the realm of the ridiculous.

John himself has spent the entire drive staring out the windows, his mind on a dozen trails of thought, crisscrossing one another and leading him around in circles. He's gained some of the weight back from when Sherlock first appeared, some of the muscle mass as well, is better rested and cared for, and has let his hair grow out a bit, as long as he can stand it, because he knows Sherlock prefers it that way. He eats more; Sherlock's kept track. It's not what it was before Sherlock left but it's better than when Sherlock first showed up, the two of them looking like they were on some kind of hunger strike.

If there was someone else they aren’t around now, don’t come looking, and left no trace for Sherlock to find. He could ask Mycroft, or Lestrade, or Mrs. Hudson even -- but it would get back to John, and that’s unacceptable. Sherlock’s lost the privilege of prying into all of John’s secrets for the time being, that much John’s made perfectly clear.

Lestrade has forgiven Sherlock as well, if the return to the status quo is any indication. There haven’t been many cases, not yet, but a few, and they’re interesting enough to entertain Sherlock. It’s when they find themselves at the Met near midnight, Mrs. Hudson dozing on their sofa with the telly on, that Lestrade says, "You're good for him." He’s gesturing at John, who’s standing a few feet away, laughing at something Dimmock is telling him. He means it, because Lestrade always means what he says. It’s one of his greatest flaws. It's the first time someone has ever said anything remotely like that to Sherlock, and despite all the available evidence he has a hard time believing it.

But he has a hard time believing in several aspects of their relationship now. Perhaps it's just the result of literal _years_ of enforced denial but since his return Sherlock has found John unbelievably appealing all the time, even now has to limit himself to simply reaching past Andrew's head to slide his fingers through John's hair. John turns to look at Sherlock in surprise but smiles lightly at whatever he sees on Sherlock's face. John gets a look on his face now and then that Sherlock can't always decipher, like he's waking up from a fever dream, like the world is slowly coming back into sharp relief. He's forgiven Sherlock, has said so and shown so and himself believes it to be true.

Sherlock's mother is a whole other matter.

The traffic is bad enough that their arrival at the house is at just past one-thirty, thirty minutes past Andrew's normal nap time. Andrew started whining fifteen minutes after one, and by the time they're pulling up the drive he's complaining about the seat and his mittens and his hat and his glasses and both his parents, who are not throwing themselves to the completion of his every whim, most of which are impossible, the rest of which are completely contradictory. Sherlock nonetheless heaves his son out of the car and carries him inside, where Andrew lights up completely, pulling a second wind out of nowhere to holler for his Gra’mum.

Mummy approaches from the south parlor silently, calmly, smiling at Andrew in her typically collected way. She's seen Andrew several times in the months since Sherlock's return but never with John -- that would be difficult when Sherlock’s husband has, to this point, refused to even discuss her with him. Sherlock’s still not entirely sure what made John change his mind, though he expects he's going to find out when John inevitably blows up.

"Welcome, all of you." She kisses Andrew on the forehead, smiles as he loudly kisses her back on the cheek from the net of Sherlock's arms. She seems completely unperturbed by John's lack of a greeting, or the way he's failing to look at her for longer than half-a-second at a time. "You're late for your nap, young man,” she tells Andrew, who scrunches his face up in distaste at the word.

"You know she's right,” Sherlock says, cutting Andrew's outrage off at the pass. "Go and show your room off to your Dad. He hasn’t seen your new paintings."

Andrew reaches for John, who takes him instantly, his face a mask of conflict. "Daddy, come see my art!"

John looks between Sherlock and Adella, then sighs, looks back to Andrew. "Lead the way."

Andrew directs John gleefully -- "No, the _other_ way, Daddy; oops, the other other way!" -- and as their voices trail off Sherlock looks at his mother. She is looking off in the direction they've left in, a placid, resigned expression to her face. Sherlock's long since stopped trying to understand what any of the things she shares really, truly mean, but somehow he knows this look is significant. He's still annoyed by the feelings that pervade his chest that tell him he has to try.

"You should be happy he's here at all."

His mother glances at him, sizing him up in the manner he detests most. "I am not in need of your opinion on what I should or shouldn't be doing, Sherlock. In any case I'm satisfied with whatever manner of interaction he chooses to have or not."

Sherlock snorts, because this is a blatant lie. His mother pulls it off better than anyone else, but it doesn't matter, not when Sherlock has spent his whole life viewing the degree to which she holds familial loyalty. "You've no right to blame him."

"And he none to blame me,” she snaps back. "I'm not the one who put me in the position I took, Sherlock. You'd both do well to remember that."

There are a hundred arguments Sherlock could take, but there's no point to any of it, none, not when she's considered and discarded every single one of them already. Instead he gives her a dark look and follows as she turns to the smaller reception room, where in the last five minutes tea has been laid out for them.

John returns after another ten minutes, still quiet but calmer, less wound up than he'd been when he'd first walked through the door. It had of course been the point putting Andrew to bed, but it's always nice to have predictions validated. Adella places a teacup next to the chair John sits in but John ignores it, stares Adella in the eyes. Sherlock tries not to be too openly approving of the brash gesture, though the end result is likely his mother being the only one to notice. John is too busy throwing down a verbal gauntlet.

"Thank you for inviting us today, Adella. I came to tell you I'm not interested in seeing you again, or having any sort of further relationship with you. You may continue to see your grandson, and Sherlock, if he so chooses, but I'm done."

Sherlock's mother looks completely unimpressed, but Sherlock knows that means nothing. He wishes there were a way to warn John of the same, but the words are already sliding out of her mouth. "That is certainly your decision to make, John. I would, however, advise you to be considerate of the facts before you rush to crucify me."

John smiles an ugly smile, the derisive one he rarely pulls out anymore. "You're worried I'm being _unfair_?"

"Just shortsighted. Unsurprising, but regrettable, nonetheless. You do realize your husband is only alive because of me, yes?"

"What I realize is you lied to me for two years, that you--" John pauses, closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Sherlock shifts his jaw, annoyed that he feels guilty, annoyed that he's annoyed, bothered by everything about this conversation. After a moment John continues, "Do you feel any remorse, any guilt, at all?"

Adella raises an eyebrow, like she can't comprehend why John is asking such a stupid question. "Of course not. Needs must, and there's always a price to pay in these sorts of circumstances."

John stares at her like, against his own will, he feels betrayed. Sherlock doesn't know who he's more angered by -- his mother, for the deliberate manipulation she commits, even now, especially now, or John, for falling for it once again, so very completely. He stands up, stalks out towards the porch doors. "Find me when you're done picking each other apart and I become a necessary part of the conversation again."

Their surprised and angry responses as he strides out the door infinitely improve his mood.

**

Sherlock leaves -- _leaves him_ \-- and John is swept up with a new burst of anger that seems to come from nowhere. Rationally he could never ask Sherlock to choose between them.

This, what he suddenly feels, is far from rational.

He's left staring at Adella, and Adella staring back at him. Sherlock could never know or ever truly understand, for all his brilliance. He had left John, but John had buried Sherlock. The countless hours and days and weeks and months of grief that would overtake him wherever he happened to be, and to know, intimately, how easy it could be to die from a broken heart. The moments of crushing loneliness, and living in a flat that still lived and breathed with all Sherlock was, and expecting him to come up the steps, _swearing_ he could hear Sherlock's footsteps behind the door. John had slept with Sherlock's mobile under his pillow for months, calling his voice mail over and over just to hear him, sharp and cold and beautiful, demanding the caller leave their information. Sometimes the pain and loss would be so great he would rage until he felt hollow and thin, until his eyes burned and his throat hurt and he was shaking so much he couldn't control his own body.

Sherlock would never understand that. Never.

But the woman sitting across from him did.

She had let John bury him. She had been beside him when they lowered Sherlock's coffin into the ground and John had been overcome with panic because he would never see Sherlock again. She had seen him struggle to get back on his feet, to give Andrew some semblance of a life; had watched him try and put the pieces of himself back together in some way that was functional enough to raise his son. She had watched him, and never told him that the blind agony he was going through was for _nothing._

It is nearly incomprehensible.

"You let me believe it," John says. His hands are cold in his lap. "You let me believe Sherlock was dead."

"There was simply no choice," Adella replies calmly. "Sherlock was in danger, and I protected him, as well as you and the child."

"Don't --" John twists his hands tightly together. "Don't you dare. What you did wasn't _protecting_ Andrew."

Adella merely looks at him, and if John wasn't mistaken he could swear he saw... _disappointment_ in her face. Disappointment directed at him. "You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment," she says simply. "You are a rational man, John, I'm sure you've puzzled out what my role required of me. My involvement in Sherlock's disappearance kept him alive. Your... grief, however unfortunate, was necessary. So long as those watching knew you mourned Sherlock's death, my son was safe."

"Those... those watching me? What do you mean those watching me?" He stands, stumbles backwards when his bad leg won't hold him, and turns to face the windows. Down the small incline he can see Sherlock, just barely, walking along the stream. He clenches his eyes shut and crosses his arms across his chest.

He thought he'd been going insane -- that losing Sherlock had made something vital in him short circuit, that he was imagining danger on every corner. The first week Andrew had been back at nursery John had sat on a bench in front all day long, too scared to leave his son anywhere. To hear his fears so casually voiced is a horror -- to hear it come from someone who is supposed to, if not love him than at least care for him and his son, is the worst thing he's ever heard. It's worse, even, than his mother's casual homophobia, because at least then he understands why.

Adella stands behind him, but doesn't attempt to approach him. "Mycroft saw to your safety. No one was going to touch you."

All those times he was out with Andrew -- walking down to the Tesco, or the park, or to the shops to get Andrew new clothes. Back and forth from work, and Andrew's nursery, and Mycroft's townhouse and the Met to visit his godfather. Every time John got behind the wheel of their little car and drove here, to this house, to take comfort in being close to his husband, and to his husband's mother.

John was a Captain in Her Majesty's army. He had been to war, he had seen horrors unimaginable. He can take care of himself.

But his child, _his little boy._

He's lightheaded and sick and can't believe Sherlock has promised Adella a weekend here so she can spend time with Andrew. Staying is impossible -- leaving without Andrew equally so.

He can't stand even one more second, regardless. He mumbles, "Excuse me," and leaves the room.

**

Sherlock hears John's footsteps on the patio stone, awkward and fast, before they taper off into a soft shuffle on the frozen grass. Awkward means poor form means John is too upset to pay attention, has been driven away from Sherlock's mother in a mix of panic and pain.

The irony that these days John's limp only resurfaces in times of stress is not lost on Sherlock; would that he were capable of missing any of the injuries Moriarty inflicted on everyone his existence touched. Sherlock hates that Moriarty turned the joy of his work into a job, a _duty_ , something he had no choice but to see through to completion, that he had the power to take that away from Sherlock. He hates more the evidence Moriarty left on John's body. He will always, _always_ , hate most the fact that he can do nothing about it. Every step John makes shouts censure, rebuke. It is entirely deserved.

As such Sherlock turns away from the manicured grounds to meet John as fast as possible and reduce the damage he's unwittingly doing himself. He strides to John, who looks pale, like someone coming down with a cold. His hands are perfectly steady.

"What did he threaten you with?" John asks as they reach each other, snapping the words out between them.

"What?" Sherlock replies, thrown off.

"Adair, what did he threaten you with?" John's eyes are like pinpricks, sharp and cold and damn near panicked. Sherlock wonders what in sodding hell his mother said to him.

"I told you already-"

"No, _no_ , you told me only what you had to,” John breaks in. He doesn’t have his gloves or a scarf but seems unaware of how cold it is. "I want to know exactly what he told you he'd do."

Sherlock opens his mouth but the words don't come, not until he forces them, the effect a strange ten-second delay. "He... threatened to kill you. To -- to kill Andrew."

John swallows harshly at the words, but as he crowds into Sherlock's space his expression is unmoved. "How?"

"What do you mean how?" Sherlock snaps. This is not something he's ever going to be able to discuss with any grace.

"Exactly what I've bloody said -- how, with your mother, and Mycroft, and you, and half the sodding Met, and, should all else fucking fail, me, would he have got to either of us?"

"You remember Moriarty," Sherlock answers, grabbing John by the upper arms. John's shivering, cold or anger or shock. "You know how capricious he was. Just as likely to kill an employee as promote them; he didn't have the capacity to manage the tedious side of his own self-styled kingdom. It was all Adair -- all the contacts, the bribes and the threats. It all led back to him. And he -- he was perfectly happy letting a murder look like an accident, if it got him what he wanted."

"And what he wanted was you -- and only you -- gone." John is saying the words as if he doesn't believe them, which is disconcerting. Sherlock has nothing else to give him. "Why dead? Why not just disappear, leave a note explaining it all?"

"He would have been on the lookout -- I had to get him to drop his guard." John _knows_ this, they've been over it before. It's beyond unbearable that Sherlock can't see beyond his own sodding thoughts on the matter to what the point of John's question really is. Damn the man, and _damn_ Sherlock's own resulting bathos.

John comes to the point anyway, despite Sherlock's abysmal failure to deduce it on his own. "Did you think about us at all?" he asks. The monotone he's using belies the sentimentality of his question; there's no wistfulness or romance. He really just wants to know.

Sherlock hesitates, but the pause doesn't help him figure out how to explain any of it better. "I... I thought about Andrew. Constantly."

"But not me." He makes it into a statement of fact; his eyes are looking past Sherlock, to the field beyond, the trees without their leaves, the stream that trickles by.

"I couldn't." When John looks back to him he continues, "I'm... I'm not good with -- moderation." He finds himself holding onto John tighter than he intends and has to loosen his fingers, even if he can't actually make himself let go. "I remember thinking on you the fifteenth of October the first year, on seventh August the following year, and then that twenty-first September. I can give you the corresponding circumstances if you like." He will, too, if John asks him to, even though the thought of bloody _reminiscing_ of that time holds about as much appeal as pouring acid on his eyeballs.

Whether the words have any impact Sherlock isn't privy to, when John's face is like stone. "What aren't you telling me?" he presses, ignoring Sherlock's offer. When Sherlock doesn't answer fast enough, John pulls his arms up, breaking Sherlock's hold on him. He points one finger up at Sherlock's face, his other hand in a fist by his side. "Tell me the truth, Sherlock Holmes. Why did you leave?"

Sherlock, for once, has no control over his own expression, no idea what he looks like. "Because he'd been stalking you and Andrew for months, and using Sebastian Moran to do it."

John's first thought is, _I'm going to pass out_. It isn't hysterical, or out of anger, or anything else -- it's just simple, matter of fact, and bears a terrifyingly strong resemblance to the feeling that had overcome him when Sherlock ripped a bomb off of him in a darkened swimming pool. Then he'd been nearly paralyzed by fear -- now, he is so stunned he's cold, joints like water. His legs are having a hard time holding him, and he closes his eyes until he can breathe. Sherlock says something, several somethings, a cacophony of sound that makes John want to tell him to shut up _please shut the hell up._

There is no end to this. No end to the lies, and half-truths. "That other man you killed. He’s the man – you _promised_ me, Sherlock, that you had told me the truth."

"I did. John, I told you the truth," Sherlock says. "Everything I've told you is the truth, from my leaving to my return. I simply...I was trying to protect you from information that had no relevance to your continued well-being."

John makes an ugly, sharp sound that grinds in his throat, and _there_ is the anger. "I'm a grown man. I'm your partner. I don't need to be _protected_."

"But you do," Sherlock argues, and John could punch him, he really could. "This... this feeling that I live with, that I carry around as easily as I do my keys, my wallet -- protecting you, and by default our son, is paramount, the most important thing in a collection of important things. Your safety, and the safety of our child, comes before everything, even your own pride."

"You don't get it," John says, scrubbing his fingers through his hair. "You just don't get it."

"No, _you_ are the one who isn't getting it," Sherlock snaps. John stares at him, wide eyed. "You are _my family._ Nothing and no one was going to stand in the way of your safety and well-being."

"I'm not helpless!" John yells, startling Sherlock back a step. "When did my thoughts, my opinions, stop mattering?"

"You’re being patently ridiculous," Sherlock snaps in return. "Really, letting your emotions cloud your better judgment is one of your most obvious flaws."

For a moment, one precious second, John thinks he's going to actually hurt Sherlock. "And I hate it when you act like a cold, calculating bastard," he replies, shoving a finger in Sherlock's face. "You should have told me about Moran, and Adair, and everything that was happening. You should have informed me so that we could have made a decision, together."

"Impossible," Sherlock replies firmly. "One misstep and you both would have been killed, and that--" He glares at John, furious. "Can't you see how impossible that would be? A life without you, without Andrew? One hint and Moran would have put another bullet in you." He shoves John's finger back, and pokes one of his own, hard, into the thick scar tissue in John's shoulder. "He probably would have grown bored with this spot. How about here?" He pokes John's chest. "Or here?" His stomach. "Just for the sheer pleasure in watching you bleed out on the pavement." He takes a step back, furious. "That was not going to happen. Not while I could still do something about it, while I still had breath in my body. Your anger over this fact is ridiculous."

"You're an idiot," John replies thickly, stunned. "I've never -- my entire life -- you do realize who and what I am?"

"My husband. The father of my son."

"A soldier," John answers. "A doctor. You asked me, all those years ago, 'Afghanistan or Iraq'. You saw me once upon a time for something more, but now that we’re married I'm not anymore? Is that it, Sherlock? Please explain it to me, because I simply don't understand how it is that all of this was happening behind my back and you never thought to talk to me about it."

“Stop it -- just stop it,” Sherlock snaps. John’s face hardens but Sherlock steamrolls over him. “I never stopped looking at you like that. We were solving cases until the day I left, you know that.”

“Then why didn’t you just _tell_ me?” John asks, puffs of cold air curling from his mouth.

“Think, John.” He steps up, puts his hands on either side of John’s face. “I slept next to you, worked with you, watched you care for our son. I know everything about you.”

“The point, Sherlock.” John is staring up at Sherlock; even now he’s gorgeous, startlingly so, face flushed, lips parted, eyes wide. Yes, the time apart has flipped some switch in Sherlock’s brain, broken it entirely. Several of them, because not only does he have this problem but he can’t find it in himself to care.

“The point is, I can tell the difference between the words Moriarty and Moran, even when they’re mumbled in the midst of a nightmare.”

John shoves Sherlock away sharply, livid. “Don’t you _dare_ try and turn this around--”

“I’m not,” Sherlock answers honestly. “But. I had thought -- initially I was only looking for Moran, _which I told you I would do_ ,” he emphasizes, for all the good it does. “By the time I realized Adair was involved it was too late.”

John glares. “You made one frankly horrifying comment about Moran in the week after it all happened, that’s not even close to telling me you’re engaged in a long-term manhunt on your own.”

He keeps stepping back, stepping away from Sherlock, and like he’s being tugged along Sherlock follows him, somehow afraid of John walking away from him right now, frantic in a way he’s not sure he’s ever felt before. “It _is_ the same, I thought it was the same, it wasn’t deliberate until the end-”

“That doesn’t make it better!” John interrupts.

“ _He was stalking you_!” Sherlock hollers, his temper getting the best of him. “You think I’d draw you into that even further? _He was stalking our son,_ he _kept_ stalking our son, even after I left. As soon as he realized you knew he would have seen no reason to keep his distance any further, would have escalated things instantly. This was the only choice, John, you have to see that.”

John is shaking his head, turning away from Sherlock. “It never ends, not with any of you. It’s just one misdirection after another.”

Sherlock darts around to stop his progress. “John.”

“I can’t do this anymore, Sherlock. I really can’t.” He’s looking off to his left, at the west entrance.

Sherlock swallows the first nine responses that come to mind, settles on, “You can’t leave me.”

This is apparently not the right thing to say, as it only makes John laugh harshly. “Can’t I?”

“You won’t.” He hates the way it sounds more like a question than a statement. John wouldn’t, not after all this, not when there’s Andrew to think about, never mind that the divorce rate in the UK has risen several points in the last five years, that John already has a steady job and two years experience raising Andrew on his own, that Andrew would never consent to living without John, that this was the one way in which all of Sherlock’s connections and family ties and experience would mean nothing, _nothing_ if they didn’t _want_ to be with him--

“Sherlock. _Sherlock._ ” John tugs Sherlock down by the lapels of his coat, tugs him close. “That’s not what I mean. Get it through your thick head already: I’m not going anywhere.” He lets go but Sherlock stays close, just until he stops feeling so frighteningly adrift. “But this -- this has got to stop.”

 _He's changed so much_ , John thinks, staring up into those bright green eyes. Sherlock wasn't the same man who had thrown himself, cross and pouting, on his mother's eighteenth century sofa, or the man who had tried to shoot himself up in the gardener's cottage. The man staring down at him is someone hardened by experiences John would never know about. That he is still Sherlock is not a question -- but neither is he the immature idiot he'd met at Bart's, too cocky by half and in need of a good seeing to.

Sherlock is trying, god help them all. He's going about it the wrong way round, utterly inept and totally insecure, but John had told him, over the paperwork for the marriage license at the registrar's office, that he would always be there to guide Sherlock through the worst of it when Sherlock had voiced his concerns about his ‘abysmal record in all matters personal'. John had promised, and has already broken that promise over and over again.

Sherlock has changed but John can't help but feel he hasn't, that he is still the man who let Sherlock abandon him at countless crime scenes, and the man who let Sherlock get away with trying to abandon him for India, and the man who let Sherlock come back after faking his death, when any other rational human being would have killed him first and asked questions later. The enormity of the power Sherlock has over him isn't lost on him, worse because Sherlock knows it, and worse still because John recognizes it and can do nothing about it.

He thinks on this for a bit, aware of Sherlock walking next to him. The grounds are beautiful for the time of year, but the air has a nip to it that will deepen by the month's end. He tucks his hands into his coat to warm them. Sherlock is silent, and John wonders at how the circumstances of a man's life can have so much direct impact on everything, how Sherlock has been so shaped by all that has happened to him, by his mother, by the people around him who could never understand his enormous intellect. How all the circumstances came together to make Sherlock chose between life and death, between staying or leaving.

That Sherlock thought he had done the right thing isn't lost on John. And he understands why he did it now in a way he didn't before. Sherlock's motivation for leaving them all had always been something John had wondered at -- something he had always known Sherlock was glossing over and hiding from him. He had let it lie, easy in the fact that Sherlock had told him enough, and that he hadn't lied. That they had been in so much danger, that Sherlock had kept _this_ kind of information away from him, that he had thought his only course of action was to actively plan his death and disappearance by getting his mother involved, is telling.

John, _idiot_ that he was, hadn't seen or suspected a thing, delirious with happiness over their new baby, and their home, and the business they were building together. Too filled with joy to see the danger, to name the expression in Sherlock's eyes the last time John saw him, the morning of his death.

He doesn't know how long it will take him to piece things together, or how long it will be until he feels like the John Watson he was when they first met, when they fought Moriarty side by side. Only that he is exhausted by this constant feeling inside of himself, a twisting churning burning in his guts, worse when another level of Sherlock's deception comes to light, which seems to happen just when he feels like the wounds are finally healing. Bottomless, as if it'll go on forever, the feeling is compounded by two years worth of memories made so much worse by the thoughts he'd had at the end, thoughts which he will never voice to another soul. To feel so much for another person, to love that deeply, and then to learn the sharp, stinging truth about how very little he matters in the entire situation, and just where his place is, is at once humbling and utterly humiliating.

They stop by the bridge leading over the stream, which leads off to the orchard already past harvest. The ground beneath the beautiful trees is covered in leaves. Andrew had eaten his first apple from those trees.

"What did I do, Sherlock?" he asks, simply, turning to look up at him. "When did I lose your respect?"

" _John_."

John shakes his head. He needs to know, for his own well-being. "Was it when we I insisted we go to see my mother, even though I knew, at least partially, what would happen?"

"John--"

"Is it because I take so much shit from you and just ask for more?”

Sherlock stares at John as bafflement and exasperation go to war in his brain, neither making headway, neither gaining enough ground to be verbalized.

John, as usual, misinterprets. "That bad, huh?"

"What?" This conversation is like trying to translate ancient Sumerian, equally as frustrating and fruitless. "No. Of course not."

John looks at him with blatant disbelief, and bone-deep exhaustion. It seems improbable the two years apart are solely to blame -- that in the intervening time John has stop being entertained, exhilarated by Sherlock, has instead found nothing but disappointment and disdain. "Then what is it?"

"I can't give you an answer because the question is misleading,” Sherlock explains. "You don't want to accept the truth, but you don't want me to lie either."

"You must have some recollection, Sherlock,” John snaps. "Surely the moment wasn't deleted."

“Stop being ignorant,” Sherlock argues back. "You haven't lost my respect -- you _couldn't_ , not without ceasing to be the person we both know."

"The thing is," John starts, looking out across the grounds -- he loves the land, Sherlock believes because it reminds John of his childhood home, during the time when his father was alive -- "you say that, and then you make huge, life-altering decisions without so much as alerting me to the situation first."

"That's not a lack of respect," Sherlock says, "that's just efficiency."

John bursts out into laughter, the real, loud, high-pitched kind no one would ever expect to hear from him, as though this is the funniest thing he's heard in a very long time. Sherlock stares at him, bewildered. It's possible he's actually got _worse_ at understanding emotions and the nuances of communication after all his time apart from typical human interaction.

"This can't happen again," John says, after he's got himself under control. He straightens up and stands at parade rest, so clearly, so _obviously_ the soldier that Sherlock is momentarily insulted John would think him incapable of missing it, of forgetting it. It's written all over him, woven into him, inextricable. "From now on you don't decide what is or isn't important to tell me -- you tell me everything, and we decide together."

"But that would be an enormously redundant waste--" Sherlock pauses at the look John sends him, the tilt to his head speaking volumes. "Everything?"

"Everything."

Sherlock considers this. "Except in cases of life or death."

" _Acute_ life or death,” John amends. "Twelve hours or less."

"A day."

"Eighteen hours."

"Fine,” Sherlock says, caving ungraciously.

John nods, then adds, "And you still have to fill me in as soon as possible afterward."

"Yes, yes, alright." Sherlock gives John a glance, trying to evaluate how much leeway he has. "I'd like to make a rule of my own then."

"Oh, really?" John asks, looking up at him, half wary, half-bemused. This look is much more familiar, makes something unwind in Sherlock's chest.

He has never been completely comfortable at the intensity with which he needs John, relies on him. The words lie at the tip of his tongue, unspoken: _I disappeared for two years, because I knew at the end I'd have you or I'd be dead. There was no third option_. He couldn’t raise a child on his own, couldn’t have managed what John did. John hasn’t changed much of who he is to be with Sherlock -- if anything he’s just become more himself. Sherlock, on the other hand, has warped his being around someone he never expected to have, and can’t imagine surviving the day to day drudgery on his own now, when he knows there’s something different.

He doesn't say it though, because he thinks somehow that would just make things worse. Instead he moves them to sturdier ground. "You have to let me make actual decisions regarding the care of our child."

John frowns at him. "I already do."

"No, actually, you don't. In the last two weeks alone you've over-ridden me on food, nappies, clothes, transportation options, afterschool activities, bedtime rituals--"

"Okay, okay, okay." John looks blindsided, which is unsurprising, he clearly had no idea he was doing it. "Do I really?"

"Yes,” Sherlock says. "I understand it's residual from the two years prior but really John, you're not alone anymore."

John considers this as they walk across the bridge to the bare orchard. The sun is beginning to crest down across the sky, and before long it would be time to turn back before they caught cold. For now John burrows down a bit into his scarf, thinks about what Sherlock has said.

It's beautiful, this land. John can picture Sherlock here, just like those stories Mycroft told him -- running wild and free, so _smart_ and so reckless and so full of fun and mischief. He can picture Andrew here, as he gets older, and maybe...maybe more children, a girl, or another boy, so Andrew wouldn't be lonely. He can picture a life again, can picture Andrew as a teenager, and as a young man with children of his own. He can picture himself, and Sherlock.

They stop, and against the backdrop sunset Sherlock is beautiful. The light catches the reds in his dark hair, the lines along the corners of his eyes. He has never been more perfect.

You're not alone anymore, Sherlock had said, but neither was he.

"I'm proud of you," John tells him quietly. "For what you did for us, for loving us enough to give up everything."

Sherlock stares at him as if he's never seen him before, and John brushes the backs of his fingers along Sherlock's cheek, his jaw, and thumbs gently along the line of it. "I'm proud of you, for protecting our son. It took courage to do what you did. I know it wasn't easy leaving us, because I know how much you love Andrew, and me."

Something in Sherlock's face cracks open, and John realizes, suddenly and viscerally, that he should have said that months ago. He reaches up and hugs Sherlock tightly, tugging him close until he can bury his face in all those curls only now beginning to grow again. "I'm sorry for what you went through, for the sacrifice you made for us. And I love you too, Sherlock."

Sherlock says nothing, but when he pulls back from John he can't quite look at him, eyes red and turned away. John lets him, laces his right hand through Sherlock's left and tucks both warm into his coat pocket. They begin to walk again, sun setting and cold nipping at his nose. He wants something hot to warm his belly, and Sherlock's bed on the third floor, and their son who, as they cross the bridge and make their way back up the grounds, is running to them as fast as his little legs will carry him, Mycroft's Basset Hound running and barking joyfully beside him.

**

Sherlock’s not sure when it happened, but at some point they started drifting back to themselves, and these days he feels like someone he remembers. It helps that John looks at him the same way. Sherlock still occasionally wakes up in the night, choked with his own panic; John still occasionally looks startled when Sherlock walks into the room, or slams a door. They happen less and less often, both. The cases help, the familiar process, John’s sure presence by Sherlock’s side.

They still constantly argue over Andrew's routine; Sherlock has far less patience for Andrew's excessive dependence on it, and a much higher tolerance for Andrew's subsequent temper tantrums. John is far more used to giving Andrew his way; most likely because that was easier when it was just the two of them, when John was just trying to make it through the day. But the arguments are no longer threatening, no longer sets them on the knife’s edge of destruction. It’s the same as everything they argue over, and they argue over _everything._

But in regards to Andrew, it’s required the development of some considerable skill on the part of both his parents to make their lives work around Andrew’s needs as he turned three, as he inched ever closer to four. Lucky for all of them John and Sherlock enjoy a challenge; lucky for all of them Andrew’s needs are fairly simple.

Fairly.

“I don’t _want_ to be in the bath,” Andrew protests from where he is clinging -- literally clinging -- to the kitchen entryway wall. Tonight is not the normal bath night.

“Not an option, I’m afraid,” John answers patiently, searching in the cupboards for something, most likely Andrew’s favorite cup. Andrew has a favorite everything, and neither of his parents are above using that to their advantage.

John’s shoulder is bothering him, Sherlock can tell, but not badly enough that his pride will let him say anything. It’s the reason he’s trying to herd Andrew into the bathroom instead of just carting him there by force, as is occasionally required.

“No,” Andrew whines piteously, dragging the word out, “not going to take a bath tonight.” This back and forth has been going on for an hour, and is increasingly distracting. Sherlock does have a case to solve, even if it is an embarrassingly pedestrian one.

“Andrew,” Sherlock says from his spot on the sofa, “you look like you’ve been rolling around in refuse. You’re taking a bath.”

Andrew had turned at the sound of his name, blinked confusedly through most of Sherlock’s sentence, and at the word bath brought the tears out again. “No no no no no no no--”

“--Yes, let’s go,” Sherlock says, standing up and coming over to scoop his son up at the waist with one arm. Andrew squirms and cries and pleads like imminent torture is on the horizon. Sherlock carries him to the bathroom, sets him down on the bathroom floor, and sits pretzeled directly in front of him.

“No Papa, no bath. I want to go _play_ ,” Andrew tearfully explains. His glasses are lopsided, his clothes are a mess and there are giant blades of grass in his hair. Sherlock would probably let all that go but the accompanying smell is truly unacceptable. Sherlock is really quite happy he skipped on this particular class trip.

“Shirt first,” Sherlock says, and despite his many complaints Andrew obediently raises his arms so Sherlock can pull the dirty polo over his head.

“Wanna go play,” Andrew says, voice temporarily muffled.

“Then take your bath,” Sherlock answers, depositing the shirt next to him. He glances up as John approaches behind them. “Look, your father has decided to spoil you rotten with bath toys and brought you a cheap plastic cup.”

“Pour the water!” Andrew says, nonetheless reaching out greedily for it. John hands it over, deliberately knocking it on the back of Sherlock’s head along the way.

Once inside the tub Andrew seems to forget his prior resentment entirely, too busy splashing and trying to eat the bubbles, no matter how terrible they taste (Sherlock had tested them and really didn’t see the appeal). Forty minutes later Andrew is dry and dressed and curled up in his bed, eyes shut, one arm wrapped protectively around a giant stuffed frog.

John is sitting on the sofa instead of his usual chair, which means his shoulder hurts more than it did an hour ago. His eyes are closed, but they open calmly when Sherlock sits down next to him. “Solve the case yet?”

“Already texted the details to Lestrade; they’ll have our unimaginative perpetrator by morning.” He eyes John. “A bed would be more comfortable.”

John snorts. “Cheesy pick-up lines are not required at this point in our relationship, Sherlock, though I appreciate the effort.”

Sherlock opens his phone to answer Lestrade’s text. “I mean for your shoulder.”

“It’s fine,” John says, letting a massive yawn break loose.

“Next time you have to stop an old woman from tumbling out of her wheelchair use the other arm,” Sherlock orders, and smirks when John looks at him in surprise. “How did you know that?”

“Obvious,” Sherlock says, not looking up. Lestrade is being especially stupid about this for some reason; Gregson is probably being more difficult than usual.

“Not to me,” John says, and his head tilts over to rest on Sherlock’s shoulder, which is bony and uncomfortable, John’s told him so a million times. Sherlock lifts his arm up and around John instead. “Well, first of all, there was the mark on your right shoe--”


End file.
